Category: Assessment

I can remember taking part in marking moderation sessions using the Assessing Pupil Progress grids. We marked using ‘best fit’ judgments. At their worst, such ‘best fit’ judgments were really flawed. A pupil might produce a very inaccurate piece of writing that everyone agreed was a level 2 on Assessment Focus 6 – write with… Read more »

In my previous posts I have looked at some of the flaws in traditional teacher assessment and assessments of character. This post is much more positive: it’s about an assessment innovation that really works. One of the good things about multiple-choice and short answer questions is that they offer very high levels of reliability. They… Read more »

My last two posts (here and here) have looked at how teacher assessments can be biased, and how tests can help to offset some of these biases. I’ve been quite sceptical of the possibility of improving teacher assessment so that it can become less biased: the more you try to reduce the bias in teacher assessment,… Read more »

In my last post, I spoke about how disadvantaged pupils do better on tests than on teacher assessments – and also about how many people assume the opposite is the case. It’s interesting that today, we seem to think that teacher assessment will help the disadvantaged. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the… Read more »

One of the frequent complaints about tests is that they are a bit dehumanising. Every pupil is herded into an exam hall, there to answer exactly the same questions. The questions they answer are often rather artificial ones, stripped from real-world contexts and on occasions placed in formats, such as multiple choice, that they will… Read more »

On Thursday I spoke at an Intelligence Squared debate called ‘Let’s end the tyranny of the test: relentless school testing demeans education’. Together with Toby Young, I spoke against the motion; Tony Little and Tristram Hunt spoke for it. There were a number of important points of agreement between the two sides. Tony Little told… Read more »

I was a member of the Commission on Assessment without Levels, which met earlier this year to look at ways of supporting schools with the removal of national curriculum levels. The final report was published last week, and here are a few key points from it. 1. Assessment training is very weak The Commission agreed… Read more »

I first wrote this post back in September 2015 and have updated it in June 2016. Over the last three years, I have written a number of posts about assessing without levels. Here’s a guide to them. First of all, what were the problems with national curriculum levels that led to them being abolished? And were… Read more »