Tracking pupil progress: Things you need to understand about assessment

You’re a teacher (duh!) Part of your role is to show that your students are “making progress” in your class/ department/ faculty/ school. To demonstrate student progress, you give your students assessments to complete. OK. The results from the assessment are often used as a proxy for student progress, usually because grades/scores offer you a straightforward way to track progress over time. But… do they? Before you delve into your next discussion about student progress, there’s three things you should understand about assessments. These three things will shape your approach and your plans.

1. When you give students an assessment, you’re testing specific bits (and only a small percentage) of the total subject’s knowledge, at one particular moment in time. Progress is the change in attainment between two points in time. Unless you test that specific bit of the total subject domain again, you’re not actually measuring progress. You’re just testing a different part of the subject domain. So in this case, let’s say you run six assessments over the year, six separate assessments that test six different parts of the subject content can give you an average score for the student between the six assessments, but doesn’t give you progress data.

2. To get some kind of progress data, you have to test enough of the content to see what pupils can do. Then you test that again. Therefore, you need longer assessments (that test a higher percentage of the total content), spaced out over time. So instead of short quizzes, you’ll need full on exams that test a lot of content. Then another exam that tests a lot of content. Then another, etc. Obviously this has implications for workload, but in terms of effectiveness, this is more effective.

3. True mastery happens when students can answer any question; complete any task that comes up at any time, on any topic. Can your students do that? That’s the goal – mastery. So what you test actually shouldn’t matter, since it could/should be anything at all, and your students should know it. What they can do at random, on demand, is the true measure of how much of the subject they understand, and ultimately for us and our accountability measures, how likely they are to do well on any final exam.

So while assessments offer us a glimpse into our students’ knowledge at specific moments in time, they might not fully capture their progress or mastery of our subjects. This reflection might not provide many answers, but I hope it sets the framework for the right kind of thinking to take place in our teams.