Section 2
The nature of the assessment task
There are three key questions:
• What are we doing when we assess?
• How can we be sure that we are accurate in our assessments?
• What different approaches are there?
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In Unit 5 of the first programme, we looked at what it is that we are actually
trying to do when we assess.
In essence we are trying to find out what someone has learned, either as we
go along (formative) or at the end (summative). And the bit of learning that we
are interested in is usually to do with the aims we set in our lesson, unit or
whole curriculum. Or we might be checking before we start to see whether
they have already learned what we are about to teach them (initial
assessment).
The learning concerned is actually contained inside someone’s head.
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Yes, it’s a picture of the neural networks of
Any idea what this is?
the brain. What about this next picture?
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These are the synapses – where nerve cells interconnect.
When we learn something, a new connection is made and
the pathway becomes more complex.
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So, if learning is about making new connections in the brain, then
assessment is about finding out what new connections have been
made.
Perhaps the process
should look like this.
(That’s a brain they’re
all looking at, by the
way. This is a GCSE
exam of the future.)
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As we cannot actually get inside our pupils’ brains, we just have to do the
best we can. Assessment is not an exact science.
In order to find out what is going on inside someone’s brain, we have
to observe their behaviour in certain controlled situations. At the
simplest, we ask them some questions and see what they say. If they
say “Paris” when we ask them what is the capital of France, we
conclude that they know what the capital of France is.
So the big issue for assessment is how valid are the conclusions we
can draw from our observations. Simple pieces of knowledge are easy
enough, but it starts getting more complex when we get into deeper
understanding. Can we really conclude that someone understands
something complex from the basis of their answers to some
questions? And would everyone respond similarly to the same
questions, even if they had equal understanding?
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Do you remember ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’ from Unit 5 of the first Programme?
Reliability in assessment means that whoever carries it out would come to the
same conclusion. Validity means that we are actually assessing the thing we
want to assess. Unfortunately, the two are often at the opposite ends of a line
of tension. The more reliable an assessment is, the less valid it seems to be.
And vice versa.
We gave IQ tests as an example. They are high in reliability, but we are not sure
if they are measuring intelligence or the ability to answer IQ test questions – so
low in validity.
Assessments made by teachers in the course if their work are often the most
valid, but there is always a question of subjectivity and whether all teachers
would come to the same conclusion. So they are low on reliability.
Validity
Reliability
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We mention “know” and “understand” here – and these are
some of the ‘building blocks’ of the curriculum that we looked
at in Unit 1.
Do you remember what they were? They are important to
letting us look into the brain, and to deal with the issues of
validity and reliability.
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Unit 1 looked at these ‘building blocks’ of the
curriculum:
Knowledge
Possession of information
Skills
Ability to perform mental or physical operation
Understanding
Development of a concept: putting knowledge in
a framework of meaning
If you recall, each of these levels of expectation had some related
verbs that made them explicit. These help us unlock what is in the
brain.
Knowledge
State, name, label, draw, identify, describe
Skills
Carry out, perform, find, investigate, explore
Understanding
Explain, justify, analyse, give reasons for
These are the verbs that also help us make
the assessments.
Knowledge
Skills
Understanding
But what implications do these
three forms of learning have for
assessment?
This is what we shall be looking at
across this programme of Units.
But here is a short outline to go
on with.
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Knowledge is on the whole the
easy bit to assess because
usually a simple question will
be sufficient. We can be both
valid and reliable in our
assessment of knowledge. Not
only that, we can assess whole
classes at a time because we
can do it through written
papers. This is probably why
we are so keen on doing it.
Understanding is much harder to assess because this is where we really need
to get inside the brain. Because we cannot actually do so, we need to look for
‘proxy measures’ such as the ability to explain or give reasons. These will give
us some idea about the extent of understanding. This is best done through
oral questioning of individual students in a series of different situations over
time. Much more expensive – and much less popular. It also runs into issues
of reliability.
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So, that’s all very technical – but this Unit is supposed to be
about making use of assessment! This is where we come back
to those pairs of assessment words:
Formative summative
Diagnostic evaluative
Initial - ipsitive
Did you notice some definitions appearing in earlier slides?
Did you spot them?
In fact, these six terms are all different uses of assessment.
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Here are some short definitions:
• Initial is to establish a baseline or starting point
• Formative is to check how learning is progressing to make
adjustments to the course or to teaching as you go along
• Summative is to get a final picture of learning – often for
reporting or accountability reasons or to award a qualification
• Diagnostic is to find out why someone is not learning as well as
they should
• Evaluative is to find out how well a programme or institution is
doing (rather like the SATs)
• Ipsative is finding out how well someone in doing in relation to
their previous performance.
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Of course, all of these are uses that we will wish to make of
assessment at some point in a year: establishing a baseline or
starting point, getting a final picture of learning, finding out why
someone is not learning as well as they should, finding out how
well someone in doing in relation to their previous performance.
You might also want to find out how well a lesson or unit of work
went or, if you are a school leader, how well a class or the whole
school is doing.
But most importantly as teachers, we want to check how well
learning is progressing so that we can make adjustments to our
teaching as we go along. This is the formative use, and there is
much more to follow about this in this unit.
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In Unit 1, we referred to the Note for inspectors: use of
assessment information during inspections in 2014/15
This states that inspectors will:
• spend more time looking at the range of pupils’ work to consider what
progress they are making in different areas of the curriculum
• talk to leaders about schools’ use of formative and summative assessment
and how this improves teaching and raises achievement
• evaluate how well pupils are doing against relevant age-related
expectations as set out by the school and the national curriculum (where
this applies)
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So Ofsted see both formative and summative as
important. But to make any use at all of assessment,
we have to be clear about what sort of learning we
are assessing: knowledge, understanding or skills.
They each have their different methods.
As we have seen, knowledge is the most
straightforward. Understanding is fairly
straightforward if it can be done orally – the issue is
one of time.
But skills, especially mental skills, are difficult. We
shall look at these separately in the next section.
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