Following a year carefully sequencing our curriculum and focusing on improving teaching techniques to deliver content effectively, my aim for the coming year is to review how our assessment model can be improved and complement our curriculum content. Assessment has already begun to evolve as a result of our improved curriculum delivery, but also now needs to change rapidly to help secure real success in the techniques we have successfully employed.

This blog focuses on my thinking and planning for how assessment will look in science this coming academic year.

The current assessment model that we have used faculty-wide in science has become unfit for purpose. In fact, when asking myself the crucial question, “What is the purpose of each assessment?” I found my answer was really unsatisfactory, the bottom line: because our end of topic assessments fell with enough regularity to meet the whole school assessment policy we were trying to use a single assessment for multiple purposes. It was supposed to work summatively, to provide an overall grade for the student in that topic, which we would then combine with their other topics to give an average grade for science. It was also supposed to work formatively, to show the teacher where each student had knowledge gaps. We even produced each student a personalised feedback sheet with improvement tasks so that they could work independently and spend lesson time doing this. I’ve learnt so much about direct instruction vs. discovery learning in the past couple of years, that to think we assumed students could learn the thing they found the most difficult independently, feels totally illogical now!

This is not to say it is wrong to have an assessment where both formative and summative conclusions can be drawn; however we were using an assessment at the end of a topic to try and do ‘everything’. When I evaluate the questions we used, some were well designed, and with confidence, I can state whether a students has understood the knowledge or the concept. However, for some questions, which I had previously considered suitable, I realised it was not possible to tell whether the student understood the concept, as it may be that their ability to read and decode the question was preventing them from answering correctly. Secondly, trying to assess understanding of practical skills – what if the student doesn’t have the knowledge that underpins the experiment being used in the assessment? Dylan Wiliam’s opening chapter in The ResearchED guide to Assessment delves into this more deeply in considering the validity and reliability of assessments.

So, our model just hasn’t worked well enough, it did not effectively inform the learning journey and secure better progress for all students. To achieve this, it is vital the classroom teacher is embedding and acting upon the outcomes of various short assessments throughout a topic which are used to draw formative inferences that immediately alter the lesson or future lessons. Our model also contained no longer term recall than beyond one topic; I could not say whether they had retained knowledge over a term, or a year.

Hence the need for change, and on reflection some small changes to assessment have been part of our curriculum evolution over the past few years, for example: introducing a specified practical in each KS3 topic and giving specific feedback to develop skills; and the use of retrieval practice strategies to make knowledge stick – see my blog on retrieval practice. However, with a clear learning journey now sequenced in our curriculum and an appreciation of securing the building blocks before progressing, it is only right that we update our assessment approach to complement our learning strategy.

So, my reflection on improving assessment has taken me on a journey over the past few months in seeking out lots of research and views on assessment. The rest of this blog presents some, but not all, of my thoughts (there are too many) on the different sources I have visited and concludes with an outline of the approach to assessment we have adopted for this coming year.

References

• The ResearchED Guide to Assessment, Sarah Donarski
• Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice, Harry Fletcher-Wood
• The CRAFT of Assessment, Michael Chiles
• Making Good Progress, Daisy Christodoulou
• Where Next? Assessment in the Principles of Instruction, Dr Helen Skelton

The ResearchED Guide to Assessment, Sarah Donarski

This book really has been an incredible source in encouraging me to think more widely about the assessment challenges I was facing and often enabled me to come up with solutions. Below are just a few of the key ideas I took away from my reading:

• Dylan Wiliam’s chapter helped my thinking about not to call the assessment itself summative or formative, but the inferences drawn can be either; and although doing this without really realising it brought greater clarity to my considerations of the purpose of each assessment.
• Claire Hill introduced me to ways of utilising MCQ’s, and the also asking students to give a ‘confidence score’ which can encourage ‘hypercorrection’ when students are responding to feedback. The key is how this is implemented to maximise impact.
• Ruth Powley encouraged me to reflect on my own in classroom practice – Do I probe higher attaining students more thoroughly than lower attaining students? Do I give all students the same ‘wait time’ to answer a question? Do I give the same amount of detail in my feedback?
• Rich Davies provided a fascinating insight into how ARK academies have implemented assessment, and given me lots to think about in terms how some of the techniques could be used effectively on a smaller scale (some couldn’t due to sample size)
• Kris Boulton introduced me to the idea of the difficulty model and quality model of assessment. It made me consider how the science exams are a good example of the difficulty model except for 6 mark questions which also look for quality of answer. This makes me consider how I will decide on questions to set – which type of outcome do I want to achieve?

There were many more ‘take-aways’ from every single chapter of this gem of a book, but the above gives a flavour of how it has greatly informed my thinking.

Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice, Harry Fletcher-Wood

This was a book I read very early on in my curriculum planning, it opened with chapters about planning a unit and planning a lesson. It provided me with some initial ideas that I was then able to take and use to shape a coherent curriculum sequence.

As the title suggests, the ideas in this book fed into my planning on what assessment looked like day-to-day in the classroom. It presented ideas on how to use responses from students to immediately alter and influence the learning journey within a lesson or in preparation for the next lesson. The checklists at the end of each chapter in this book served me well in beginning to think about my own personal practice before exploring assessment further.

The CRAFT of Assessment, Michael Chiles

A quick read (good thing!), crammed full of useful tips and ideas for implementing assessment. In this book Michael Chiles has concisely constructed the method, CRAFT, for thinking about the process of structuring assessment; from the delivery of knowledge through to the feedback process to move students forwards.

From this book I took away a wide range of ideas to explore further, including techiques for encouraging students to retrieve knowledge and reflect on what they know; and the ideas for time-efficient methods of feedback to move students forward in their learning. This book works really well to inform the individual classroom teacher on how to truly utilise assessment as tool for progress.

Making Good Progress, Daisy Christodoulou

As with each of the books I have read to inform my planning for assessment, they each support and reinforce each other on what works well to create an assessment structure that we use with students to move them forwards in their learning. At the heart of all of these resources is how assessment is part of the curriculum and not something we ‘do to students’.

Daisy Christodoulou’s book Making Good Progress is no exception, it prompted me to again think carefully about the purpose of assessments and how to use them to achieve the best outcomes for students. One of the things it really made me think about was how assessments are used, when assessments are used, their frequency and the breadth of content assessed at different points.

Where Next? Assessment in the Principles of Instruction, Dr Helen Skelton

When I came across this blog in my wider reading, it was incredible how much Helen Skelton’s experience resonated with my own train of thought. As she described her experience of assessment it became a checklist of my experience too:

• End of topic assessments to generate report data – check.
• Formative assessment focused on recently learned content – check.
• Formative assessment with little thought to it’s purpose and how it would actually be used formatively – check.
• Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction and Tom Sherrington’s Rosenshine’s Principles in Action stimulating my reflection – check.

My then subsequent actions in the classroom were also very much a mirror of the beginning of Helen’s journey too:

• Introducing low stakes retrieval quizzes at the start of every lesson to make factual knowledge stick.
• Learning how to build these questions more effectively to suit my classes and using tasks that assess prior learning that is essential for the focus of the new lesson. Giving me a baseline of which ‘building blocks’ to re-teach before launching into new content.
• Improving how I question students so that I can glean answers from all students and not just an individual via cold calling. I rediscovered my love for mini whiteboards in the past year!
• Ensuring my sequence of learning was in a logical order and broken down into sufficiently small ‘building blocks’.
• Using opportunities for student practice that allowed students to repeat the process and also become progressively more challenging.

The real nugget I took from Helen’s blog, and also her ResearchED Norwich talk, was how she has developed her use of exam style questions. I am looking forward to trialling the use of exam questions in a greater variety of ways to help me diagnose students knowledge and skills more effectively.

Science Assessment Model

As a school our new assessment model has taken into consideration all of the thinking about the types of assessment, and constructed a three ‘tier’ framework for embedding assessment in the curriculum.

• Tier 1 – the day to day, in class assessment by the teacher. Measuring the progress of students and adapting the learning journey accordingly.
• Tier 2 – the key points throughout a sequence of learning where it is pivotal to check whether students have understood a concept. The assessment is used formatively and feedback to students is used to address gaps and move them forward.
• Tier 3 – Summative assessments that measure knowledge of students over a term, and as the year progresses recall from previous terms. Data will produce scores which can be used to compare each individual in the year group. Linked to this, core subjects will also use GL Assessments to allow us to align our expectations with those of a National cohort.

Tier 1 – Assessment in an Individual Lesson

Tier 1 considers how assessment is employed on a granular level, it works to check student progress against the success criteria of a lesson and inform the learning journey within the lesson and moving into the next. It enables a teacher to act responsively to the needs of their class.

This is how Tier 1 assessment might look in a lesson:

• Start of the lesson: use of retrieval practice techniques to ascertain prior understanding essential for the lesson I am planning to deliver.
  • This is something as a faculty we introduced to all of our lessons, a starter quiz which involves a range of recall. I have been working to develop carefully crafted sets of questions that involve recall from the previous sequence of learning and also from links to other learning to check for retention and that the class are ready to commence the new learning.
  • Example: When teaching water purification techniques I may begin a lesson with the following set of questions:
    1. Write the definition of osmosis – I ask this question to ascertain that if they know what osmosis is then they are ready to learn reverse osmosis. It also work nicely as a cross-topic link with biology and some long term recall.
    2. What is the difference between a mixture and a compound? – This question checks whether students have the prior knowledge so that I can encourage them to apply knowledge of mixtures to the impure water as a mixture.
    3. Draw a dot and cross diagram of a chlorine molecule – I use this question as an opportunity to assess long term recall of paper 1 knowledge near the end of Year 11.
    4. What is the difference between aerobic and anaerobic respiration? – Another cross-topic link to biology. If students understand this question then it means they will be able to appreciate, and understand what is happening during both aerobic and anaerobic digestion in sewage treatment
    5. Name two examples of salts. – I use this question to assess long term recall of another paper 1 chemistry topic, and it makes a small link to dissolved salts in potable water and the process of desalination of salt water.
• Retrieval Practice throughout the lesson: In my planning I will identify key points within the lesson where I can pose ‘hinge questions’ or provide students with an opportunity to recall their learning from segments of the lesson.
• End of Lesson Learning Check – I will ensure that by the end of the lesson I understand clearly where students are in their learning so that my next lesson will start and continue coherently. Some techniques I may use here include: a mini whiteboard quiz or a printed exit ticket that I collect for marking.
• Finally, Extended Learning (homework). In some situations I may opt to use homework as a key opportunity to also gather assessment from students – with the caveat of them potentially having Google as their assistant! However if I opt to make the homework something like ‘plot a graph’, knowing that I am going to ask students to do this next lesson; they will a) not be able to get the answer from Google, and b) I will very quickly be able to identify at the start of the next lesson what sort of scaffolding I will need to provide to enable students to improve that graph plotting skills.

Tier 2 – Assessment Throughout a Topic

Possibly the most challenging Tier to implement; these are the assessments that form the narrative of progress and learning for each student. The information gathered from these will inform the feedback cycle the teacher provides for the class and individuals.

Across a topic this would include:

• Checking Prior Knowledge
  • To identify the baseline starting point of each student in the class.
  • Could be completed at the end of the final lesson on the previous topic, beginning of the first lesson of the new topic or potentially as an extended learning task at home by the students. I favour the idea of using all three of these opportunities – the end of the previous topic to scope out an overview of their understanding and at home to delve a bit deeper (although risks Google providing answers). This will then allow me to use diagnostic assessment at the beginning of the first lesson to focus on whether the students have the building blocks to access the learning I have planned for that first lesson and enable me to act responsively to their needs from the outset.
• Carefully planned checkpoints.
  • Throughout the topic I will need to know whether students have understood a particular concept in order to move on – threshold concepts, ‘hinge questions’.
  • I will be using our faculty ‘Age Related Expectations’ (AREs) to help me identify these points and then construct a suitable assessment to check their understanding. As a team we will develop these so they are consistent across classes and allow for us to compare groups and individuals and measure progress.
  • I intend to use a range of strategies, some examples include: MCQs to check knowledge, extended writing to check understanding, Practical write ups to check Working Scientifically and Maths Skills.
• Exam Practice
  • Threaded throughout the topics I teach I will also be looking to include opportunities for students to experience exam questions. I will need to select exam questions carefully to ensure it is knowledge I know students already have and that the focus can be on ‘how’ to answer the question rather than having to think of the knowledge first.
• End of Topic MCQ
  • A summative assessment to check specific knowledge, understanding and skills in this single topic. The outcomes of the MCQ will be used by the class teacher to inform topics for interleaving and recall later in the term.

Tier 3 – Assessment Across a School Term

In line with our school assessment policy, at the end of each term students will complete an assessment of their learning from the term, and as the year progresses, longer term recall too.

These assessments are going to need careful planning and constructing to ensure they will enable us to draw valid inferences from them. These assessments will include:

• A section of short answer questions to assess knowledge and understanding of concepts. These questions will delve more deeply than MCQs, using exam banks to help with design and then to adapt them to ensure accessibility.
• A section on Working Scientifically skills. The knowledge aspect of these questions must be one that will be secure for students so that we can effectively assess their skills with other barriers minimised.

It has been an exciting start to the year introducing this idea of an assessment narrative that builds throughout a topic – so far I can already see how I am better informed about the progress of my students and that I am acting even more responsively to their needs. As a team we have been embracing the production of the assessment materials and working together to grasp the logistics of making assessment a tool to drive progress rather than solely a process to measure outcomes.