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Is Your School Expecting too Much of Your Data?

The only purpose of assessment should be to help staff develop their teaching in a way that will enhance learning, says Stuart Kime

Stuart Kime
by Stuart Kime
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In 1979, the psychologist Jerome Bruner expressed the idea that children should be able to ‘experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information.’

At the heart of Bruner’s argument is the act of dispassionately appraising what a child knows, can do and understands; he wasn’t interested in praise or chastisement.

Bruner had a point. Research from Ryan and Deci (among others) suggests that supporting learners towards greater states of self-motivation and self-regulation leads to greater interest, enjoyment and inherent satisfaction.

Doing so, however, requires several conditions for learners, but at the centre of these is accurate and unbiased information (often drawn from assessment tasks) which seeks only to achieve one purpose: to enhance learning.

Ineffective praise

Teachers everywhere speak of feedback as an important tool for learning, and rightly so.

The evidence around feedback also points us towards the need for the information fed back following an assessment task to focus on three things: the task itself; the process undertaken by the child in completing the task; and the child’s self-regulatory ability in undertaking the task.

Generally, feedback that seeks to praise children at the level of the self (“You’re a really great speller”) is ineffective for the purpose of enhancing learning. Assessment policies that make explicit links to robust feedback practices can help to foster the use of assessment information as a tool for effective learning.

Assessment policies need to respect the limitations of assessment.

The process of assessing students’ work accurately is both fragile and open to the kinds of misuse that lead to poor decision-making, wasted resources and detrimental effects on student motivation and self-regulation that, while often unseen, can have lasting ramifications.

Dylan Wiliam’s image of assessment being a ‘bridge between teaching and learning’ is pertinent here: some bridges are built better than others; some will carry greater loads.

To avoid the potential pitfalls that open up in front of anyone making decisions about assessment in school, a clear understanding of what can and cannot be achieved with this most useful of pedagogical tools is imperative; that understanding must then translate into policies and practices in school.

Some schools have formal assessment policies, some don’t.

Irrespective, all schools have an ‘approach’ to assessment, or some kind of system, but do these things create the circumstances in which information is – as far as possible – devoid of reward and punishment and instead focused on task, process and self-regulation? Do they allow strong ‘bridges’ to be built?

Unintended consequences

1979 was clearly a good year for psychologists coming up with quotable lines.

Another academic – Donald Campbell – said, ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’

In essence, Campbell’s Law issues a warning that is wholly relevant to assessment policies and practices: don’t expect too much of your data. Don’t make the bridge do things for which it was not constructed.

Moreover, there is a really practical argument for not expecting too much of assessment, and for building the best version of the ‘bridge’ as possible.

Assessment policies often require teachers to make judgements and produce grades, marks, percentages or levels, but these products (and, by default, the policies which mandate them) are often highly flawed, due to the inaccuracies inherent in the assessment practices that policies decree.

Policies which focus on assessment fostering and supporting learning (rather than on perceived administrative needs) can allow well-trained teachers to gain far more benefit from this aspect of their work than many currently do.

Waste of time

A lot of time can be wasted in the construction and implementation of poorly-constructed assessment policies. I read through a sample of 30 schools’ policies in 2017 and tried to put myself in the position of a teacher using them to guide their practice.

From that, and from my broader understanding of the research on effective assessment practices, I concluded that good assessment policies have certain characteristics:

  • They depict reality
  • They are based on sound theory and practice
  • They lead to better outcomes than would be caused by their absence
  • They are manageable
  • They are understood by those who need to understand
  • They are implemented as directed

By building a strong bridge between what we teach and students’ learning, we can not only understand more about what our children know and can do, we can develop more accurate and responsive teaching practices.


The benefits of testing

One of the oft-overlooked facets of assessment is that the act of repeatedly having to retrieve information or use skills that children have been thinking about and learning is – in and of itself – a powerful learning event.

‘Retrieval practice’ (using low-stakes testing) improves children’s ability to retain and apply learnt material. Testing – contrary to the beliefs of some – can be hugely beneficial to learning.

In practice, the use of retrieval practice testing is becoming more common, but there is still resistance to it. School policies can help create the conditions in which it becomes more common.

Reducing teacher workload by removing fruitless marking activities is one way and improving teachers’ facility to design, analyse and use good assessment based on sound theory is another.


Stuart Kime (@stuartkime) is director of education at Evidence Based Education. The company’s Assessment Lead Programme is an online training and support service that helps teachers improve pupil outcomes.

A lot of this may seem like common sense, but I challenge anyone reading this to check their own policy and practice against it.

What’s the point?

In May last year, Evidence Based Education collaborated with the Chartered College of Teaching to create the ‘What makes great assessment?’ event.

We brought together experts from the worlds of teaching, professional development and research to hear what they had to say. One theme ran throughout: the importance of purpose.

I am a proponent of purpose-driven assessment. It’s a way of thinking about assessment which begins with the end, by asking ‘What is the purpose or end use I want to make of the information generated by this assessment?’.

Only by asking and answering this question can we ever make a judgement about an assessment’s quality. We can never know if it’s fit for purpose if we haven’t established its purpose.

Ultimately, if a school’s approach to assessment is working well, it should be both efficient and effective in supporting pupils’ learning.

In doing so, teachers and school leaders need to develop a conscious understanding of their own policies and practices, so that they are able to answer the following four questions:

  • What are you and your students doing?
  • Why are you and they doing this?
  • What is the impact of what you and they are doing?
  • How do you know?

Answers to these questions come from clarity of purpose in terms of both learning activities and assessment practices, and these stem from well-designed, well-implemented and sensible policy decisions at the phase and school level.

By building a strong bridge between what we teach and students’ learning, we can not only understand more about what our children know and can do, we can develop more accurate and responsive teaching practices.


The benefits of testing

One of the oft-overlooked facets of assessment is that the act of repeatedly having to retrieve information or use skills that children have been thinking about and learning is – in and of itself – a powerful learning event.

‘Retrieval practice’ (using low-stakes testing) improves children’s ability to retain and apply learnt material. Testing – contrary to the beliefs of some – can be hugely beneficial to learning.

In practice, the use of retrieval practice testing is becoming more common, but there is still resistance to it. School policies can help create the conditions in which it becomes more common.

Reducing teacher workload by removing fruitless marking activities is one way and improving teachers’ facility to design, analyse and use good assessment based on sound theory is another.


Stuart Kime (@stuartkime) is director of education at Evidence Based Education. The company’s Assessment Lead Programme is an online training and support service that helps teachers improve pupil outcomes.

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