Video introduction

Watch the video. The video outlines what you will cover in this Block.

Video transcript

Assessment is a really important, ongoing process of finding out what your pupils know and can do, where there are gaps and crucially what they and you need to do next to progress their learning.

You won’t find a teacher in England that tells you that they’re not using assessment to find out what their pupils are learning – this is known as formative assessment. But are they doing it well? What does it even mean to do assessment well? Why is feedback so important as part of the assessment cycle? How often and how detailed should your assessments and feedback be?

Get it right and assessment and feedback can be a teacher’s best friend. Formative assessment is one of the things research is most certain will improve learning, especially when combined with high-quality feedback. Get it wrong and it can be the bane of your life. Bad assessment practices are both pointless and time-consuming. It is easy to spend huge amounts of time setting and marking assessment that doesn’t tell you much. Equally, if you fail to deliver the feedback in a useful way it might not make any difference to pupil progress.

This Block will support you to establish what effective assessment and feedback practices are.

When assessment is used well, it gives you critical information about what pupils are learning, what they understand and what additional support they need. For an assessment to be effective, it is important to be clear about the reasons you are assessing a pupil at any particular point. To do this, you need to develop an understanding of what good assessment looks like.

Assessment can easily become onerous and have a disproportionate impact on your workload. To avoid this, it is important to work with colleagues to identify efficient approaches to assessment. Good questioning in the classroom is also an easy and efficient way to assess learning. During this Block, we will provide you with ideas on how to do this in a practical way to ease the load.

Just as you need the information from assessments to support you to adapt and improve your teaching, pupils need information from you in the form of feedback to help them improve their work. Within this Block we will explore what this looks like in practice, drawing on key evidence from research about what makes feedback effective in improving learning outcomes.

You may be feeling as though assessment and feedback is a demanding aspect of your teaching role, but through this Block you will understand that mastering assessment and feedback is the foundation of excellent teaching. When you know exactly where your pupils are in relation to where you want them to be, you can make informed decisions about how to adapt your teaching, what feedback to give pupils and what to plan next so that pupils improve more rapidly than they would otherwise.

There has been a lot written about the impact of assessment and feedback on workload in recent years, with a major benefit that we know more now than we ever have about which techniques are effective and sustainable for classroom teachers. This Block draws on all of this research to develop your practice.