Precise assessment at TSC involves checking that our students have learned what teachers and leaders need them to learn. The purpose of our assessment processes is to:
- Diagnose how well students are performing at the point they are at in the curriculum.
- Achieve a harmony across the school: consistency, clarity, robustness.
- Be a procedure for making inferences about the ideas, concepts, skills and competencies that students have acquired from a learning log/scheme of learning/specification. Otherwise, learning is invisible!
- Elicit evidence that allow us to make a reliable judgment about student attainment.
- Allow us to, as precisely as we can, forecast likely student outcomes at KS4/KS5. This means we can identify learning gaps efficiently to support student progression into KS4/KS5.
Each subject uses two main responsive assessment processes to improve learning:
- Formative, in class, minute by minute, responsive assessment such as questioning, low stakes quizzing, question grids etc…
- Key Assessment Pieces that take place during or at the end of a learning log(s) scheme(s) of learning, through a Pre Public Exam (PPE) or an end of year assessment.
By being carefully mapped out and sequenced throughout a curriculum map, these assessment processes set out to be powerful learning tools that diagnose and stimulate learning for the teacher. They also provide high quality information to enable intelligent aggregated professional judgements about attainment. These judgements will be reported home twice a year.
Following Key Assessment Pieces, subjects moderate/benchmark assessments. This helps subjects ensure reliability and validity through quality control and helps curriculum areas agree a standard of excellence/mastery/scholarship. Samples are kept for future for norm referencing. By banking an assessment piece of which teachers have shared understanding, it increases reliability and precision of our future judgements.
One of the processes involved in Key Assessment Pieces is for teachers to go through a ‘therapy feedback’ process to improve the learner. Feedback for students is part of the teaching and learning process, actionable and task focussed – not simply repeating the same work. Students may then be re-tested to demonstrate learning.