The role of attainment evidence

Attainment evidence was used to answer the first of my research questions: what is the effect of the Thinking Skills approach on pupils’ progress in Maths? This was important because - whether we like it or not - schools, teachers, and educational interventions are primarily judged by their effectiveness upon pupils’ progress and attainment and thus I believe that to overlook this facet of pupils’ experience of teaching and learning would be almost incredible in this age of accountability. This data is quantitative and arguably constitutes the most concrete, objective evidence of pupils’ learning in Maths throughout the research period.

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Having decided to include attainment data in this study, it was logical to make use of the teacher assessment data – given in National Curriculum levels - routinely submitted each half term to West Side Primary’s Senior Leadership Team. National Curriculum levels are the primary means of comparison used by bodies such as Ofsted to assess pupils’ progress, and to compare schools in the government-produced league tables. Indeed, assessment, in terms of these National Curriculum levels, is one of the key elements of my role as a teacher, and thus it was a very straight-forward and pragmatic decision to make use of this data – data that I am contractually obliged to generate regardless of any additional research that I may or may not be undertaking – rather than seeking to re-invent the wheel by constructing some new and personal form of assessment which would also prevent comparison with previous cohorts or with similar groups of pupils nationally.

West Side School policy requires that teacher assessments for each individual pupil should be determined using the ‘Assessing Pupils’ Progress’, or A.P.P., document. Typically, a range of independent work, including tasks completed in pupils’ books, weekly mental Maths tests, end of term or post-unit assessments, and practice S.A.T.s papers, were used to determine to what extent pupils’ had fulfilled the various assessment criteria for each National Curriculum level. An example of a completed A.P.P. document can be seen in Plate 3.4.

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Plate 3.4 A completed A.P.P. document

The various annotations refer to the dates when pupils demonstrated their ability to complete the Maths described in each assessment focus. Usually, two or three pieces of evidence were referenced before a pupil could be considered to have mastered each aspect of Maths. Substantial guidance has been produced to advise teachers on the proper use of A.P.P. to successfully ‘level’ pupils’ work, thus enhancing the reliability of judgements made using this particular system. In addition, over the course of the several years since the A.P.P. was introduced West Side School developed a system for moderating teachers’ judgements, further increasing reliability. Further detail regarding this moderation process can be found later in this chapter.

Whilst, as teacher-researcher, the advantages of the use of this existing progress and attainment data – in terms of the relative ease of collection and subsequent validation – were immediately apparent, there were also a number of drawbacks. For example, during the 2011 – 2012 academic year, there was a small yet potentially important change in the ways in which teacher assessment data was submitted to West Side School’s Senior

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Leadership Team. At this time, a new assessment system was introduced, measuring progress not just in whole sub-levels, but also in half sub-levels or ‘points’, thus dividing each National Curriculum level into six, rather than three. This allowed teachers to more accurately describe pupils who were on the cusp just before reaching a new level, or who were consolidating their current sub-level, so that this progress could be reflected in the data routinely submitted to West Side School’s S.L.T. without having to account for what may previously have appeared as pupils stagnating, or failing to move sub-levels for prolonged periods of time. The 2011 – 2012 academic year also marked the beginning of this research, and this subtle shift in assessment system meant that the data collected from the focus cohort could not always be compared directly with previous cohorts who had been assessed using the previous system, and whose progress was measured in the larger sub-levels rather than according to the narrower ‘points’ system.

Nevertheless, even when using this more precise system, I still felt, upon occasion, that the development of my pupils was not always truly captured, so that, for example, whilst sizeable gains may have been made in terms of pupils’ confidence and breadth of repertoire relating to strategies for problem solving or reasoning relating to a particular aspect of Maths, this did not always neatly translate to enough extra highlighted boxes on the A.P.P. to merit a move of a ‘point’ or sublevel. This is, of course, the complaint of teachers everywhere: our pupils make progress yet this is not always accurately represented by standardised forms of assessment and testing which require very specific responses and evidence. Yet, whilst this assessment system is not perfect, I appreciate the need to have some form of standardisation and perhaps also, particularly as a result of this research, acknowledge the difficulties inherent to charting the development of true understanding. Therefore, with all of its flaws, this remains, for me, the most appropriate means of attempting to measure gains in attainment and progress.

Once gathered, this quantitative data was used to compare the progress and attainment of the focus pupils, not only against that expected nationally, but also against previous cohorts in the same school. This allowed comparison both with the progress and attainment of the one hundred or so pupils working within a similar context – that of West Side School, albeit for pupils within a previous cohort – and with the national expectation, a standard

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used in primary schools across England. In this way, I hoped it would be possible to judge whether the focus year group were representative of other pupils at West Side School, or whether their progress and attainment could be attributed to the Thinking Skills approach. This was done in several distinct stages:

1. average number of sub-levels of progress made during Year 5 2. levels of attainment at the end of Year 5

3. average number of sub-levels of progress made during Year 6 4. levels of attainment at the end of Year 6

The data was analysed using these particular stages primarily for pragmatic reasons,

particularly as a result of the evolution of the research process. At the outset of research, for example, I originally intended for this research to span a single academic year. At this time, I did not know that I would have the opportunity to teach the focus cohort as they moved into Year 6. Nor, in all honesty, did I expect the Thinking Skills approach to have so slight an impact upon progress and attainment during the first year following its introduction, although, upon reflection, it would have been logical to do so given the findings of Boaler and Staple’s (2008) research at Railside School. The information relating to progress and attainment during the first year of research was therefore collected and analysed with the intention that this would then form a complete data set. This data therefore features in the Part A of the Findings chapter of this thesis and has been given in percentages to reduce the impact of any discrepancies in numbers. Nationally, pupils in Year 5 are expected to make one sub-level of progress. Expected attainment at the end of Year 5 is Level 3a. Pupils in Year 6 are expected to make three sub-levels of progress to reach Level 4b by the end of the year.

It is important to note that the three children who were admitted to Year 5 throughout the academic year have been omitted, as was one child who left West Side School at the beginning of the 2012 – 2013 academic year. These children were not present in West Side School throughout the research period in its entirety, and I therefore felt that their progress could not be solely attributed to the teaching methods described in this investigation. Similarly, it was necessary to exclude them from the analysis of attainment data because of

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the impossibility, in some cases, of comparing their attainment at the end of Year 4 with that at the end of Years 5 and 6. Equally, it was necessary to discount the data relating to some pupils who were in the two previous cohorts to the focus pupils. Here, data relating to progress and attainment was used as a means of comparison to help situate the results gained from the focus pupils, and thus to more accurately assess the impact of the Thinking Skills approach. These pupils left West Side School at various points between Years Two and Six, and have been discounted because of the impossibility of tracking their progress and attainment throughout the entirety of their primary education.