Teaching challenge

Mr Jones feels his lessons are increasingly clearly designed and convey the key ideas to his pupils. However, he often feels unsure how much pupils have understood during the lesson or by the end. Sometimes, end-of-unit assessments suggest that pupils have failed to grasp key ideas. How can Mr Jones develop ways to identify what pupils are thinking – and what they have misunderstood – in order to ensure they are all meeting the learning goals?

Key idea

Effective formative assessment shows the teacher what pupils are thinking: this makes it possible to meet pupils’ needs, making it more likely they will meet learning goals.

Evidence summary

The role of summative assessment

Mr Jones encounters many forms of external assessment on a regular basis in school. Often, pupils complete practice versions of external exams or commercially-developed tests in order to demonstrate progress or highlight gaps in their knowledge. However, the information this provides often comes too late to enable him to make the kind of changes he hopes to make. He is unwilling to wait until the end of the key stage to find out exactly how much pupils have understood.

Mr Jones’ initial idea is that he will adapt these external assessments and use them in his lessons. However, this proves problematic. These assessments are designed to demonstrate what pupils have learned over a long period of time (Wiliam & Black, 1996). To do so, many questions integrate knowledge of multiple concepts: a question may ask pupils to draw on their knowledge of algebra and number, to write a paragraph or to compare different concepts. Errors may not tell him whether a pupil lacks basic knowledge, misinterpreted the question or holds an underlying misconception (Christodoulou, 2017).

Creating exams and ensuring they are marked reliably is a complicated, intricate and time-consuming process: this is not something an individual teacher can easily simulate (Christodoulou, 2017). Mr Jones still wants his pupils to succeed in summative assessments and he uses them to help ensure he is teaching everything pupils need to know. Moreover, if he needs to make a summative judgement, he should choose these materials where possible and draw conclusions from patterns of performance over a number of these, while remembering that assessments draw inferences about learning from performance. However, his focus is identifying what pupils have learned - or misunderstood - in order to adapt his teaching accordingly. This means he focuses on using formative assessment.

The role of formative assessment

An assessment is formative if it is designed to lead to a change in what the teacher (or the student) does (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Effective formative assessment practices help teachers collect evidence about pupil understanding and needs and adapt their teaching to support pupils to be more successful (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Speckesser et al., 2018). Mr Jones is aware of the risk of using ‘poor proxies’ for learning (Coe, 2013): of believing that students have understood because they are busy, engaged, working hard, or answering questions correctly even if they haven’t fully understood or couldn’t reproduce the work independently. All of these are valuable and desirable, but they do not show that pupils have understood the key ideas and avoided misconceptions.

Designing formative assessment

Mr Jones’ previous work identifying and setting clear learning goals proves useful in formulating precise assessment questions. He focuses on questions that show whether pupils have mastered the key idea in the lesson or whether they hold misconceptions – being particularly mindful of pupils with specific learning barriers linked to special educational needs or disabilities. It helps to design questions with data analysis in mind (Wiliam, 2014) and Mr Jones is mindful of this as he plans formative assessment.

For example, he knows that a fifty-question quiz will provide very detailed information about what every pupil understands but he also knows that he will not have time to review every pupils’ quiz for at least a week. It is better to decide to choose one crucial question – and use the information he gains – than to choose several important questions and run out of time to ask them or assess students’ answers. However, Mr Jones is aware that he will still need to be cautious about the conclusions he draws: pupils may produce correct answers now but struggle to recreate them in future (Coe, 2013; Christodoulou, 2017).

Using formative assessment

Once he has designed a formative assessment, Mr Jones applies it in class. He appreciates the need to gain a response from all pupils independently, since the answer of one pupil in discussion may influence that of other pupils. As a result, he gets his pupils to respond simultaneously, using whiteboards or on paper. Having collected the data, he is able to analyse it, adapt teaching and provide feedback as appropriate.

Nuances and caveats

Formative assessment, such as end of class questioning, is a powerful way to identify what pupils have understood in the moment. However, getting an answer correct one day doesn’t mean that pupils will recall it in future: they are very likely to forget some of it. Formative assessment is most useful for identifying pupils’ misconceptions or knowledge gaps and addressing them.

Formative assessment is an approach, not a technique. Using mini-whiteboards, exit tasks or hinge questions does not mean a teacher is using formative assessment: what matters is why and how they are used. If they are used to find out what pupils understand and to improve their understanding, the teacher is using formative assessment and practising responsive teaching (Christodoulou, 2017).

Key takeaways

Mr Jones can check pupils’ developing understanding by:

recognising that summative assessment has value but that it cannot provide rapid, detailed information about pupil understanding
formative assessment practices can provide valuable information about what pupils have understood and gaps in their knowledge
formative assessment should be designed around how the information it provides will be used

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