Formative Assessment

Improving Learning in Island School Classrooms

Are pupils learning enough, and learning it well in our classrooms – and how can we tell? Can our teachers not only measure the progress made by students, but also identify their learning needs and respond to them? How are we trying to address these questions?

Tests and examinations are a classic way of measuring student progress. These highly visible forms of tracking progress, known as “summative assessment” are also used by you the parents as a measure of how well your child is doing.

But this is only part of the story. To be truly effective, assessment should also be “formative” – in other words, identifying and responding to the students’ learning needs. In classrooms featuring formative assessment, teachers make frequent, interactive assessments of student understanding. This enables them to adjust their teaching to meet individual student needs, and to better help all students to reach high standards. Teachers also actively involve students in the process, helping them to develop skills that enable them to learn better.

Many of our teachers incorporate aspects of formative assessment into their teaching. Formative assessment is used as a framework for teaching, teachers set up learning situations and guide students toward learning goals, we are changing the way we define student success.

Formative assessment builds students’ “learning to learn” skills by emphasising the process of teaching and learning, and involving students as partners in that process. It also builds students’ skills at peer-assessment and self-assessment, and helps them develop a range of effective learning strategies.
Students who are actively building their understanding of new concepts (rather than merely absorbing information) and who are learning to judge the quality of their own and their peers’ work against well-defined criteria are developing invaluable skills for lifelong learning.

Look at the ARR system on the Gateway, we are actively trying to get our students to self assess their progress, to work to criteria upon which their skills are assessed, to look at progress, not just judged to a grade or a level but to look at the reflective feedback. Different types of assessment are set across the curriculum to provide students with challenge and the opportunity to show their skills.

It is about the learning journey that the students are on not just about the grade outcomes. If we all focus on the grade and miss the process of the skill development, we will limit the learning that is happening.

Remember discuss with your child the information that is on the ARR, get them to explain to you the process they have been through on each of the different types of assessment. We need you to become part of the formative assessment. The more opportunities your child has to discuss their learning the greater their understanding and the more progress they will make.

If we took all the grades / levels away would you still be aware of how your child is doing?

If the answer is no, then you have not had a learning conversation with your child. Use the grades as a guide to the progress but the conversation as the opportunity to allow your child to show you their strengths and some areas of challenge. That way you will have a better understanding of the way you can help your child further develop.

Join in, go to the ARR, set a date with your child, let them take you on a learning journey!

Trudy Lant - Vice Principal