Using assessment data to improve your school

We can differentiate functions, occasions and agents of assessment. Doing this helps provide a more realistic, sympathetic and productive approach than the binary formative versus summative. Here then is a threefold construction of assessment, highlighting what assessment is for, when it happens, who does it, and who controls it.

First-hand assessment answers the vital question ‘How well are we doing?’ This is a relatively informal, necessary and dynamic part of teaching and learning. It is one of the things teachers, pupils, and teaching assistants need to do during curriculum activity to realise the learning that is being achieved. It is what teachers and learners can do in lessons, and so they control it: it is less easily governed by authorities outside lessons.

First-hand assessment informs moment-to-moment, daily, week-by-week decisions about direction, focus and pace in teaching and learning: affecting next steps at a micro level. These relatively natural assessments can be recalled, and the cumulative insights they afford can be brought to bear on more formal, broader, medium- and long-term decisions about how best to pursue aspirations and opportunities. This includes teachers’ assessments, and blurs boundaries between ‘formative’ and ‘summative’.

Quality-assuring first-hand assessment involves observing interactions between teachers and pupils and between pupils in lessons. Our culture seems to lack trust in natural assessments. This would change if propriety, reliability and validity were recognised as residing in manifest ethical practice.

Second-hand assessment provides more formal accounts of pupils’ abilities. Here arrangements are made for relatively controlled or standardised performance by pupils, as in coursework, tests and examinations. It is difficult for learners to make this kind of assessment, and it may be unethical to ask them to do so. It is something teachers can do, as well as external examiners. Systems of second-hand assessment do not need to be, but are commonly, governed by commercial or governmental bodies.

Second-hand assessment classifies performance and informs decisions about provision, course choices and career prospects: affecting next steps at both micro and macro levels. The function of second-hand assessment is principally summative, though it may be given a formative spin. Quality-assuring second-hand assessment involves moderation, both internal and external. QCDA claims that APP (Assessing Pupils’ Progress) contributes to first-hand assessment, but the summative force of APP tends to overwhelm its formative potential.

Second-hand assessment is unwieldy, crude and expensive when used to make decisions which are better served by first-hand assessment. The custom in England is for second-hand assessment to be the officially preferred source of third-hand data processing.

Third-hand assessment is the manipulation and interpretation of first-hand but more often second-hand assessment. It deals with information at a remove from pupils and their lessons. It presents accounts of performance, usually for evaluative, then strategic purposes. It is data management, commonly governed by public bodies.

Third-hand assessment informs decisions about outcomes and value for money in institutional and governmental policy and provision at team, school, local and national levels. It is summative, and serves evaluative and political functions. Quality-assuring third-hand assessment involves scrutiny of operational and statistical processes.

To summarise:

Constructing assessment according to its proximity to learning allows its different functions, occasions, agents and controllers to be given due status and focus.

Your role as curriculum manager and leader is to guide and support colleagues in attending to the demands and effects of all forms of assessment.

To help evaluate first-hand assessment, you can use:

• lesson observations by leaders and peers
• learners’ perceptions of lessons and courses
• self evaluation by teachers and leaders, and inspection by other authorities, referring to assessment for learning (AfL)

to answer the question How well does assessment in lessons help learners learn, and help teachers and assistants teach?

To help evaluate second-hand assessment, you can use:

• teams’ moderation activities and portfolios of assessed work
• examiners’ reports
• evaluation by learners and teachers about how well results reflect abilities, expectations and aspirations

to answer the question How well does assessment of learners’ progress and achievement help maintain and raise standards?

To help evaluate third-hand assessment, you can use:

• teams’ and subject leaders’ reports on outcomes and development
• external authorities’ reports on outcomes and development

to answer the question How well does analysis of data help promote and inform development?

To help develop first-hand assessment, you can facilitate and lead evaluation and development of lesson observations and collection and analysis of pupils’ perceptions.

To help develop second-hand assessment, you can facilitate and lead evaluation and development of moderation and teams’ use of examiners’ reports.

To help develop third-hand assessment, you can facilitate and lead teams’ and subject leaders’ evaluation and development of how they use their own and external authorities’ reports on outcomes and provision.

This e-bulletin issue was first published in May 2010

About the author: Dr John Blanchard is the author of Teaching, Learning and Assessment (2009, Open University Press)