Assessment is a vital component of teaching, if we don’t know what our students know then how can we be sure they are learning?
These, in the main, are nationally set tests that allow teachers to compare their own cohort with the national cohort. This can be very useful for showing the relative attainment of a student while also providing year on year ‘progress’, (keeping a similar ranking means progress has been in line with expected). Be careful with them though, there are also many pitfalls that need to be avoided and are mentioned in my blog and also in this blog by Rebecca Allen.
Click on the link above to take you to some examples.
These assessments can be useful summative assessments to really understand how students are doing in each topic. Another word of warning with this type of assessment as well. Do not use it for AfL, let your in class assessment do that, instead use it in a similar way to the standardised assessments. Rank students in each topic and check which topics they are relatively struggling in compared to others, (ranking goes down). This will help to identify issues, that can be narrowed down through in class AfL.
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