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assessment

Chasing our tails – is AfL all it's cracked up to be?

2013-08-29T21:17:40+01:00August 29th, 2013|assessment, learning, myths|

Is it blasphemous to doubt the efficacy of AfL? While purists might argue that it's 'just good teaching', we teach in a world where formative assessment has become dogma and where feedback is king. (Don't worry, I'm not about to start upsetting the feedback applecart although there are occasions when pupils can benefit from it being reduced.) But AfL as a 'thing'? I'm not just talking about some of the nonsense that gets spouted about lolly sticks and traffic lights, I'm questioning the entire edifice. Is assessment for learning really all it's cracked up to be, or is it just me? You [...]

Testing & assessment – have we been doing the right things for the wrong reasons?

2013-06-16T18:01:29+01:00June 16th, 2013|assessment, Featured, learning, myths|

A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more. William James, The principles of psychology (1890)   Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving. David Ogilvy Tests are rubbish, right? Like [...]

Work scrutiny – What’s the point of marking books?

2020-09-08T09:02:02+01:00January 26th, 2013|assessment, leadership|

Opportunity makes a thief. – Francis Bacon I wrote recently about the differences between marking and feedback. In brief, and contrary to popular wisdom, they are not the same thing; feedback is universally agreed to be a good bet in teachers’ efforts to improve student outcomes whereas as marking appears to be almost entirely unsupported by evidence and neglected by researchers. Marking takes time Although there are some who dislike the use of the term opportunity cost being applied to education, there’s no getting away from the fact that whilst we may be able to renew all sorts of resources, time is always finite. [...]

Is teaching cheating?

2012-11-26T22:52:59+00:00November 26th, 2012|assessment, English|

The Teachmobile Today I was sent this: It purports to be a briefing sheet used by an AQA advisor to justify the movement of controlled assessment grade boundaries in this summer's GCSE English exam (otherwise referred to as the GCSE fiasco.) I can't vouch for its provenance beyond saying that it was emailed to me from a Head of English at another school who I have no reason to believe would have sent her time inventing fake documents. But you never know. Now, the arguments about grade boundaries have been rehashed endlessly over the past few months [...]

The need for 'Why To' guides

2012-06-07T16:20:53+01:00June 7th, 2012|assessment, SOLO|

I'm not a fan of telling people how to do things. OK, that may not strictly speaking be true, but I do believe that just explaining how to solve a problem is unlikely to result in much learning. The best way is to learn is to think about why a problem should be solved. As teachers we often bemoan the fact that we're not treated with respect as a profession. There are probably all sorts of reasons for this but one reason is the extent to which we've allowed ourselves to be told how we should teach. Consider how we're assessed [...]

When independent learning meets high stakes success

2012-03-10T22:09:40+00:00March 10th, 2012|assessment|

I've been thinking: our Year 11 students have just had their results back for the January sitting of the English Language GCSE exam. Currently English is a modular course, and this accounts for 40% of their final grade. 70% of our cohort have already got the marks for at least a C grade and now we are mobilisling a phenomenal battery of resources to ensure that this figure rises to at least 84% in order to equal last year's results. Obviously there is a certain amount of pride in our achievements, but make no mistake; this is high stakes stuff and [...]

Are teacher observations a waste of time?

2013-08-24T15:18:16+01:00February 24th, 2012|assessment, training|

"I never allow teachers or school leaders to visit classrooms to observe teachers; I allow them to observe only students". John Hattie (2012) I've been mulling this statement over for the past few weeks and it seems to boil down to this: are we interested in how teachers teach, or how students learn? It's become a truism in recent times to say that just because a teacher is teaching there is no guarantee that students are learning anything. But, if you walk into a classroom it's hard not to look at the teacher. Especially if they're standing at the front delivering [...]

Feedback: it's better to receive than to give

2012-02-20T22:48:10+00:00February 20th, 2012|assessment, learning|

As every teacher ought to already know, feedback and formative assessment are the most powerful, most effective things you can be doing. This means we need to be taking every opportunity to let our students know, "where they are going, how they are going there and what they might go next." Obvious, isn't it? Well, maybe not. Here are a few interesting points I have gleaned about the effective use of feedback from Visible Learning for Teachers. Hattie says that feedback should be: 'just in time', 'just for me', 'just where I am in my learning process', and 'just what I [...]

How effective learning hinges on good questioning

2013-07-19T11:08:43+01:00February 4th, 2012|assessment, English, learning|

Hands up who likes asking questions? Questioning is an essential part of helping students to make progress but only if it causes thinking or elicits evidence that informs our teaching. And the thing with asking questions is that while there are some kids who know how to make the system work for them and actively participate in lessons because that they way they’ll learn more, there are those who don't. Dylan Wiliam claims that the students who are sufficiently engaged to put up their hands and answer everything we ask them are “actually getting smarter. Their IQs actually go up.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtZ1pmY0VzI&feature=related [...]

How to subvert target grades

2014-07-23T15:27:05+01:00January 15th, 2012|assessment, Featured|

Target grades are good aren't they? They must be otherwise why would Ofsted be so damn keen on them. Consider this: how would Monsieur d'Ofsted respond when asking an unsuspecting student in your class whether they're achieving their target grade only to be told that their teacher didn't let them know what their target grade was? Doesn't bode well, does it? Here’s a somewhat contentious piece of information: if you grade (or level) students' work you are actively preventing that piece of work being used formatively. That's not right, you may be thinking, I can provide formative feedback on a piece [...]

Teaching to the test

2011-12-08T19:33:56+00:00December 8th, 2011|assessment|

In the light of the Telegraph's revelations that, shock! horror!, examiners tell teachers how to prepare students for exams it seems an opportune moment to reflect on the past two days. The chest thumping and blood letting that's followed the 'scoop' has been as predictable as it is pointless. The Telegraph says, The investigation has exposed a system in which exam boards aggressively compete with one another to win “business” from schools. Evidence that standards of exams have been deliberately driven down to encourage schools to sign up for them has also been uncovered. Twaddle. This, as every teacher knows, is [...]

Controlled assessment and why I hate it

2011-10-28T11:15:46+01:00October 28th, 2011|assessment|

Yesterday I took a break from ploughing through my Year 10 controlled assessments to exhort myself to "bloody well get on with it" and stop moaning about my work load. Marking is virtuous. You know it's important so you get with it. Plus, it produces a warm satisfying glow when you finally get the bottom of the stack and scribble your last improvement target. Except, I got to the bottom of my pile of summatively assessed controlled assessments and thought, what was the point of that? I now have a list of marks for each of my students. Some [...]

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