Assessment, record keeping and reporting

Trainees should understand and take responsibility for the impact of their teaching on pupil progress and learning over time.

Assessment

Why does a trainee assess?

To inform planning and teaching
To develop understanding of how children learn
To gain understanding of differing abilities in class
To monitor progress
To report progress to interested parties

How will a trainee assess?

When planning, decide where the opportunities for assessment are and how it will be made (eg teacher observation, self-assessment, peer assessment, marking of work).
When planning, decide what activity might support assessment of T/L.
Plan lessons so that you can sit with a group, visit a group/ individuals and remain with a group for the whole activity.

Feedback, self-assessment and marking

Feeding back to children is an important part of assessment for learning. If marking work, trainees should follow the school guidelines. When giving oral or written feedback, think about:

Being positive and encouraging;
Confirming attainment;
Suggesting ways forward.

When giving feedback, the focus should be on getting children to reflect on their work and helping them to identify ways forward. Helping children to self-assess involves them being well informed about the learning intentions, using language they can understand.

Children’s marks provide one example of performance indicators. Therefore, before evaluating individual curriculum sessions or the whole day, children’s work needs to be marked and assessed. Ensure that a pupil can understand your statements about quality, errors, misconceptions and advice.

Setting targets for children

During school experience, trainees will be asked to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed) targets for the children in their class. These may be individual, group or whole class targets.

Trainees may discuss these with their class teacher and, if possible, ask the children to make suggestions so that they have some ownership of the targets.

Targets should help children to move towards the next stage in their learning; towards new ideas and skills. This requires high expectations on your part and appropriate levels of support and activities to match pupil levels.

Record keeping

Class records of children’s achievements should help determine:

whether or not learning objectives have been realised;
individual progress rates;
specific difficulties, their nature and effect;
targets to achieve the next stage of development.

Record keeping should not be time consuming; it is an educational tool. It should be useful, manageable and sustainable. They can be completed during or after a unit of work using a type of notation to record the teacher’s assessment of each child’s understanding. Trainees have been introduced to notation of recording in their PS lectures.