Making the most of assessment time

“It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”

Seneca

As teachers we are all too aware of the limited time we have available for teaching, perhaps we think it is too little. However, for most of us, the time we are given is not within our control, but what we do with it is.

Assessment takes up a significant portion of our lesson time (a rough estimate from my department’s current KS3 is that about 10% of lesson time is allocated to testing and feedback – a surprisingly high proportion) and I fear it is time which can easily be wasted in terms of student learning.

As a department we are redeveloping our KS3 curriculum – this has involved extensive discussions around content, sequencing, pedagogy, the implications of cognitive science for the classroom, the role of practical work, etc. An area we have not discussed much is assessment. This has been a conscious decision on my part because, alongside our curriculum development discussions, I’ve been completing the Assessment Lead Programme, developing my knowledge of assessment theory and practice. I wanted to be informed before leading department development in this area. I have become convinced that assessment and curriculum must be considered and planned simultaneously so, as we reach the point of starting to prepare resources for our new KS3 curriculum, decisions need to be made about what assessment will look like. I’m writing this post as a way of clarifying my thoughts around how a department-wide assessment model might knit with the curriculum. The scope of my thoughts here is the assessments which every teacher will use – there is clearly much more assessment going on all the time in individual classrooms.

What do I want assessment to achieve?

It is impossible to design an effective assessment regime, or indeed an effective assessment, without knowing what you’re aiming to achieve. Defining purpose is fundamental to effective assessment. So, what do I want our KS3 assessments to achieve?

We’ve spent a lot of departmental time thinking about and identifying the knowledge we believe students should have, and considering the optimal teaching sequence and pedagogical strategies which will enable this schema to be successfully formed in our students’ minds. In all these areas we’re really thinking about making the best use of our allotted lesson time. The danger is that we can have the most beautifully planned and executed curriculum, but without timely and appropriate assessment, we will not know whether our students are actually progressing towards mastery of that knowledge which we have so carefully considered or how we can best support them in doing so.

Therefore, my answer is that I want KS3 assessment to inform me what students have and have not mastered as we progress through the curriculum. I want to know this at appropriate points so that gaps and misunderstandings can be revisited and addressed. This needs to be accomplished in a timescale which enables each ‘layer’ of knowledge to be secured before the next is placed on top. Without these regular checks in place, there is little point in taking so much care over considering the content and sequencing of the curriculum.

However, there is tension here, because very regular resting of recently learned content risks becoming a measure of performance rather than true learning. I want to be sure that students have really learned and understood the content for the long term. If we believe our curriculum really represents what students should know by the end of KS3, it’s no good them only knowing it for a week or two in the autumn term of Year 7. This second goal requires assessment to take place after a longer period of time by which point it may be too late to address misconceptions and plug the knowledge gaps necessary to enable students to fully access the next stage in their learning.

Evaluating our current assessment model

Historically, our practice has been to assess KS3 students after every one or two topics with a test, typically about 40 minutes long. This would then be marked by the teacher and a feedback lesson would follow in which common errors would be addressed. More recently this testing model has been adapted to include some single mark recall questions which could be from any content covered to that point in KS3, the aim being to encourage students to review their previous learning regularly. We also had an end of year exam covering content from the whole year’s work.

My concerns with this model are:

• Testing at the end of a topic is too late to address misconceptions which have arisen or ensure a firm foundation for the next stage in learning. By the time the feedback lesson arrives the class has moved on to another topic and the learning is no longer situated coherently within the context in which it needs to be understood. This could lead to additional misconceptions and will almost certainly make it more difficult for students to place the knowledge correctly and make strong, accurate connections within their developing schema.
• The end of topic test questions are largely designed to be summative rather than formative, so the specific inferences which can be drawn regarding misconceptions and knowledge gaps are quite limited, I wrote about this in a previous post.
• A single, relatively short test after one or two topics cannot possibly sample effectively from across the whole domain.
• Feedback lessons sometimes included time for students to practise further questions having revisited areas of misunderstanding, but this was very limited and of much less value than if this was incorporated into the teaching of the topic in question.

Is there a better way?

My current thinking for a new assessment model which seeks to address some of these concerns is as follows:

• Multiple choice (or very structured short answer) questions used regularly (perhaps every couple of weeks, but spaced to fit with the curriculum needs, not after a rigidly defined time interval) to assess recent learning. MCQs are quick to administer (perhaps 15 minutes at the start of a lesson) and mark and are excellent for picking up misconceptions and checking understanding more deeply than a simple recall question. These can be checked rapidly, and any misconceptions or gaps identified and addressed as promptly as the following lesson. Time should be built into schemes of work to allow flexibility for this assessment, feedback and additional practice so that teachers are not tempted to skip it due to time pressure to ‘complete the curriculum’. It’s much better to teach a bit less but ensure that it is securely learned. This is a similar strategy to one shared in a recent @PracticeScience Zoom discussion about assessment.
• Low stakes retrieval practice in most lessons. This is something we have done as a department for the past year or so, but it has been done on an ad hoc basis. I think it would be valuable to build retrieval questions into the scheme of work which systematically review prior learning and/or are tailored to activate necessary prior knowledge for the learning in a particular lesson. To maximise the benefits from these they would include some more complex explanation or analysis questions, to encourage deeper thinking, as well as straightforward factual recall.
• Infrequent summative written tests, probably termly, and including the end of year exam. These would consist of a mixture of multiple choice questions and more extended written answers and could assess any aspect of the material learned during that year. As these are summative assessments there would be no expectation of teachers spending additional lesson time on test review, unless they felt that the assessment had thrown up something specific which needs addressing.  These tests are still unlikely to sample the whole domain, but time constraints are real, and I believe that time spent on regular formative assessment will bring greater benefits. The purpose of these tests would be to provide an overview of what students have learned for the long term and, as much as anything, to get them used to preparing for and sitting a test on a large swathe of curriculum content.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

This is what I’m trying to do and my hope is that this will give much greater value to that 10% of our allocated time that we’re using for assessment. That it will equip teachers with a more timely and granular understanding of students’ true grasp of the curriculum, enabling them to be more responsive in their teaching and ensuring that knowledge gaps and wobbly foundations can be made good before the class moves on through the curriculum sequence.

I’ll let you know how it goes and in the meanwhile, if you have done something similar, or have alternative ideas for embedding an effective assessment regime in KS3 science, I’d love to hear from you.