The contribution assessment makes towards pupils learning There are different types of assessments that can be carried out in different ways and for different purposes.

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Matthew Bainbridge

QTS Assignment 1

The contribution assessment makes towards pupils’ learning

There are different types of assessments that can be carried out in different ways and for different purposes. They are accountability, formative and summative assessment. All of which will be discussed and analysed for their individual contribution towards a pupils’ learning and how one type of assessment may be used for more than one purpose. Also the pressures and implications of assessment faced by teachers will be considered.

When pupils transfer to another teacher so does the responsibility of their learning, it is therefore crucial for the new teacher to receive some information about the pupils before teaching them. Information needed by the teacher will depend on the current scheme of work and whether there is close continuity, if so then formative information about recent progress and immediate needs that the old teacher would have needed is also needed by the new (Black 1998: 27). The teacher may be moving onto work which involves a fresh start therefore the need for formative information is reduced, however the need for, ‘An overview of the pupil’s earlier achievements which might help predict capacity to profit from the new learning programme’ (Black 1998: 27) is still very much needed. In this case the type of assessment to be transferred is summative assessment, ‘This could be obtained by an accumulation of evidence collected over time, or by test procedures applied at the end of the previous phase which covered the whole area of the previous learning’ (Black 1998: 28). Summative assessment is not only to certify learning and the end of the year, such as GCSEs, but can also be very useful for teachers to acknowledge the capabilities of their class. Once the teacher understands the potential of their class the scheme of work can then be developed to try and achieve their maximum potential, this would be a formative use of summative assessment. Other formative uses of summative assessment can be to use tests taken to highlight areas of weakness enabling the pupil to focus their revision to a specific topic. The teacher may also only highlight which questions are wrong on the pupil’s exam and handing the paper back to the pupil to find the correct solution using resources available to them (Harlen 2005: 216-217). This practice will help the pupil understand their misconceptions or simply spot there calculation errors, which would hopefully fill in some blanks in the pupils understanding.

If assessment is to give a positive contribution towards pupils learning it should provide short term feedback to identify and address any misconceptions with the work. Feedback from the pupils of their understanding would be required when the work for the week ahead is built upon the work from the current week (Black 1998: 26-27). The necessity of the feedback is to ensure pupils have the required knowledge in order to progress further. The class may also progress through the topic quicker than expected; therefore the feedback can signal to the teacher that the class is ready to progress. Time may have been wasted covering concepts already understood by the class, if this feedback wasn’t available. The practice of using the feedback to adapt the teaching work to meet the needs of the pupils is formative assessment (Black and Wiliam 1998: 2).

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A particular understanding that is not yet fully understood by a pupil may not be essential providing the topic will be encountered again. Yet judgements whether a particular idea is necessary to be understood will often be unclear so

The practice of formative assessment has to be informed by a model that is quite detailed, in that it has to provide some guidance about the ways in which a pupil might progress in learning, linked to a clear conception of the curriculum and its learning goals. (Black 1998: 26).

From my experience in school I have seen mathematics teachers’ ...

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