Introduction
Over the past 25 years or so, we have recognised assessment as something that is part of everyday life in classrooms. In science, where in the 1980s it was not assessed in the primary school and hardly any records were kept, assessment has now become part of every teacher’s responsibility, and seems set to remain so. It is, therefore, essential to be clear about
■ what assessment means;
■ why we do it (for what purposes?);
■ how we do it (who is involved and what do they do?).
This chapter deals with these matters in general terms and the following six chapters we look at them in more detail.
The meaning of assessment
Consider the vignette in Box 12.1. Suppose you were asked to identify assessment taking place, would you say:
■ only when the children were writing their individual answers to the questions at the end;
■ during the investigation;
■ before the investigation?
In its broadest meaning, assessment would cover all of these. Put formally it is a process of deciding, collecting and making inferences or judgements about evidence of children’s learning and skills. There is always a purpose to the assessment relating to the use to which it is put and the action taken as a result.
■ Deciding: the evidence that is required should be related to the goals of learning and should cover all the ideas, skills and attitudes that are important in learning science.
■ Collecting: there is a wide range of ways of gathering evidence. Which is chosen depends on the purposes of the assessment.
■ Making judgements: this involves considering the evidence of achievement of the goals in relation to some standards, or criteria or expectations.
Combining various ways in which evidence is collected and the various bases for judging it creates different methods of assessment. These range from standardised tests where information is gathered while children are tackling carefully devised tasks, under controlled conditions, to assessment carried out almost impercept-ibly during normal interchange between teacher and children.
Box 12.1 Dissolving sugar
As part of an overall topic on materials a class of ten-year-olds had mixed different substances with water and looked at the results, describing them in terms of how well they dissolved. The teacher planned to go on to look at different forms of the same substance, and introduced the lesson by showing them some sugar cubes, some loose brown sugar and some icing sugar. He asked them first to discuss in groups of three what they thought would happen when these were put in water.
While they were talking he visited each group, listening to their conversations.
Several were using the word ‘melting’ instead of ‘dissolving’, even though in the previous activities they had appeared to use the correct word.
After a whole-class discussion of their ideas in which the teacher reinforced the difference between dissolving and melting, he then set them to find out which dissolved most quickly. During the investigation he noticed that one group was careful to use the same amount of sugar and to stir each in the same way, but they used different volumes of water. As they were clearly aware of having to control some variables he asked them if they thought it mattered that there were different amounts of water. They said it didn’t as long as they were all stirred at the same rate. So he asked them to add just a drop of water to a teaspoonful of sugar, stir and see what happened. He then told them to add water until all the sugar would dissolve. They realised that the amount of water did make a difference and that this was a variable that they had to control in their investigation.
At the end of the dissolving activities, the teacher asked them to work individually to write down answers to several questions such as:
Say whether these mixtures could be separated by adding water and filtering.
Explain your reason.
Mixture Can it be separated by Reason
adding water and filtering?
sand and salt sand and gravel
brown sugar and white sugar
Assessment, tests etc.: is there a difference?
The distinction between ‘tests’ and ‘assessment’ is not at all clear. Some use of the term ‘assessment’ excludes tests and refers only to various forms of informal assessment usually devised by, and conducted by, the teacher. However, this distinction is not necessarily agreed and here we use assessment as a broad term, covering all ways of collecting and judging evidence and including tests. Tests are specially devised activities designed to assess knowledge and/or skills by giving precisely the same task to children who have to respond to it under similar conditions. Tests are not necessarily externally devised: teachers prepare tests (of spelling, arithmetic, for example) and some ‘tests’ can be absorbed into classroom work and look very much like normal classroom work as far as the children are concerned. It is therefore not at all helpful to characterise assessment differences in terms of methods but rather in terms of purposes. Other words used in this context are ‘examinations’ and ‘evaluation’. Examinations are commonly combinations of tests or tasks and other forms of assessment used for qualifi-cations, or entry into certain kinds of education or professions. Educational evaluation is the term used in some countries interchangeably with assessment to refer to the achievements of individuals, while in the UK it is normally used in relation to teaching and materials for teaching and, in the context of accountability, to teachers, schools and systems.
The purposes of assessment
Consideration of the purpose of an assessment is a key factor in who and what is involved and how it is carried out. Box 12.2 summarises the main purposes of the assessment that children might experience in their school career. Not all of these are intended to help their learning and for some purposes (national and international monitoring) the children who are assessed are simply representatives of a particular group.
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Box 12.2 The main purposes of assessment
1 To help children’s learning (finding the aspects in which they are and are not making progress, what particular difficulties they are having).
2 To summarise achievement at certain times (for keeping records, reporting to parents, other teachers and the children themselves).
3 To group or select children (both within a class and where there is streaming or setting, and, at later stages, for certification and progress to higher levels of education).
4 To monitor the performance of children across a region or nation (as in national and international surveys of children’s performance, where only a sample of children is assessed).
5 To assist in research or evaluation of new classroom materials or educational reforms.
In this book we are concerned with assessment for the first two purposes only: to help learning, described as formative assessment or assessment for learning; to summarise achievement, described as summative assessment of assessment of learning.
How the purpose affects the process of assessment
Since purpose is the key to the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ of assessment it is important to consider what difference it makes to the process. As mentioned earlier, assessment involves deciding what evidence is required, collecting it, making judgements about it and using it for a purpose.
Deciding and collecting evidence
The decision about the evidence of learning is determined by the goals: the skills and ideas that the learner is trying to achieve. So the starting point is for children to be engaged in an activity relating to the goals. Evidence can then be gathered about their skills and ideas. The main methods for doing this are:
■ observing children (this includes listening, questioning and discussing with them);
■ studying the products of their regular work (including writing, drawings, artefacts and actions);
■ introducing special activities into the class work (such as concept-mapping, diagnostic tasks);
■ giving tests (teacher-made or externally produced).
Interpreting the evidence: making a judgement
Once the information is gathered it is interpreted in terms of what it means in relation to progress or achievement to date. This can be done in three main ways:
■ by reference to a description of what it means to be able to do something or to explain something that indicates ideas at a certain level (criterion-referenced);
■ by reference to what is usual for children of the same age and/or ability (norm-referenced);
■ by reference to what each child was previously able to do (child-referenced or ipsative).
Box 12.3. illustrates what these mean in an example that is unlikely in practice but illustrates the principles.
Box 12.3 The bases of judgements in assessment
Suppose that a teacher wants to assess a child’s ability in knocking nails into wood.
This can be described in different ways:
■ The teacher may have some expectation of the level of performance (knocking the nail in straight, using the hammer correctly, taking necessary safety precautions) and judge the child’s performance in relation to these. The judgement is made in terms of the extent to which the child’s performance meets the criteria; that is, it is criterion-referenced.
■ Alternatively, the teacher may judge in terms of how the child performs at knocking in nails compared with other children of the same age and stage. If this is the case there will be a norm or average performance known for the age/stage group and any child can be described in relation to this as average, above average or below average, or more precisely identified if some quantitative measure has been obtained. (The result could be expressed as a
‘knocking nails age’ or a ‘hammer manipulation’ quotient!) The judgement arrived at in this way is called a norm-referenced assessment.
■ A third possibility is that the teacher compares the child’s present performance with what the same child could do on a previous occasion, in which case the assessment is child-referenced, or ipsative.
The steps of deciding, gathering and judging evidence are represented in Figure 12.1.
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Using the judgement
What happens next depends on the purpose of the assessment and will influence the way in which the steps in Figure 12.1 are carried out.
If the purpose is summative (to summarise learning), then the judgement of what has been achieved will be used for reporting this to those who need the information: in addition to the child and his or her teacher, this means other teachers, including the head teacher, the parents and others with an interest in the progress of the children. This use of the information is represented in Figure 12.2, which also indicates that, for this use, the judgements should be made in relation to criteria or norms that are the same for all children. In addition, the evidence used should bring together all the information that is relevant to the