How can we measure progress in lessons?

This is part 6 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series.

With national curriculum levels, it was possible to use the same system of measurement in exams as in individual lessons.

For example, national curriculum tests at the end of year 2 and 6 were measured using national curriculum levels. But you could also use NC levels to measure progress in individual lessons and at the end of terms. For example, you could have a task at the end of a lesson, and then you could tell pupils that in order to be a level 4a, they would need to perform in a certain way on the task; to be a 5c, they would need to reach a certain standard, and so on.

You can see the attraction of this approach: it is coherent, because you are always using and talking about the same grades. It’s also great for accountability. When Ofsted call, you can offer them ‘real-time’ assessment data based on performance from the most recent lesson.

However, in practice this system led to confusion. Pupils might be able to perform at a certain level at the end of a particular lesson. But when they came to sit their test at the end of the unit or the end of the year, they might not be at that level. As Rob Coe says here, levels started to take on very different meanings depending on how they were being used. Far from providing a coherent and unified system, levels were providing the illusion of a coherent system: everyone was talking about the same thing, but meaning something very different.

So what is the answer? I don’t think exam grades can be used to measure progress in lessons. What happens in the lesson is an ‘input’, if you like, and what happens in the exam is an ‘output’. It makes no sense to try to measure both on the same scale. Here is an analogy: we know that if you eat more, you put on weight. But we don’t measure food intake and weight output with the same scale, even though we know there is a link between them. We measure food with calories, and weight with kilograms. Similarly, we have to record what happens in lessons in a different way to what happens in the final assessment.

If you do try to measure activities in an individual lesson with the same scale as the final exam grade, then I think one of two things can happen. One is that you use activities in the classroom which are most suited for learning and for formative assessment: for example, in English you might use a spelling test. Activities like spelling tests are not very well suited for getting a grade, so the grade you get from them is very inaccurate, and causes a lot of confusion. The second option is to start to alter all of the activities you do in class so that they more closely resemble exam tasks. So you get rid of the spelling test, and get pupils to do a piece of extended writing instead.  This makes it more likely (although not certain) that the grades you get in class will be accurate. But it means that you are now hugely restricted in the types of activities you can do in class. You have effectively turned every lesson into a summative assessment.

We should record in-lesson progress in the way that is most suitable for the tasks we want to use. And lots of very useful activities are not capable of being recorded as a grade or a fraction of a grade.