You are teaching lots of lessons, but how can you be sure that your class is learning? By embedding assessment for learning (AfL) in your teaching, you can deliver lessons with effective activities and discussions, based on specific feedback from learners. Think of it as shaping your learners’ progress, by shaping the lesson to ensure you have noticed any misconceptions or areas of difficulty. Assessment for learning also provides the opportunity to praise success!
In this blog post, education consultant and lecturer in education, Dr Karen Angus-Cole, will explore what assessment for learning (AfL) is and why it is a useful tool to integrate within your teaching. In addition, Karen will take you through how to implement AfL in an effective way.
Three key questions
To understand what assessment for learning is and why we might use it, consider the following key questions:
1. Where is the learner going?
This question helps to ensure that you have an awareness of what your learners need to know, understand or be able to do, by the end of a lesson. It is helpful to share learning intentions and success criteria with your learners, to enable a shared understanding of what they need to achieve in order to succeed.
However, remember to avoid using terminology that learners might not understand. You may decide to write learner-friendly learning intentions and spend some time checking their understanding, before starting the lesson.
2. Where is the learner now?
Think about where your learners are in comparison to the learning intentions. By regularly assessing where they are, you can find out where they are succeeding and where they might need more support.
To go a step further, get your learners themselves to reflect on their progress against the learning intentions. By understanding the end goal, learners develop reflective skills through their own self-assessment.
3. How can the learner get there?
Consider what you or your learners could do in order to get them closer to meeting the learning intentions. Use the evidence you have gathered from question two to help you make choices about what to do next.
By being responsive to learners’ needs, it will be easier to choose effective activities and provide feedback that will help your learners to progress.
You can return to these questions as frequently as necessary throughout the year. By using this process, assessment becomes integrated; learners make more progress and feel empowered to direct their own learning.
How to embed assessment for learning into your teaching?
By gathering information from questions one and two (where is the learner going?’ and ‘where is the learner now?’) and responding to that information in question three (‘how can the learner get there?’), you will have adapted your teaching based on the results of the AfL process. Regular AfL cycles enable you to deliver more effective lessons to see improved results over a period of time.
However, this does not mean that you should be giving your learners written tests or formal assessments all the time. Let’s take a look at some different AfL techniques.
Circulating and questioning
Ask learners questions that are related to the learning intentions. You could ask the whole class or an individual group of learners. Allow them to discuss the answer/s with one other as you move around the classroom. Based on the answers you can hear, gather information on learners’ progress.
While you are circulating, you might also decide to stop and speak to groups or individual learners to provide oral feedback and let them know how well they are doing. This technique is helpful for supporting learners who may feel too shy to speak out in front of the whole class.
For example:
Learning intention: Explain how plants absorb water from the soil.
Question: How do plants absorb water from the soil?
Student answer: It passes across a cell membrane.
Feedback: Good answer, but can you elaborate further? Which cell membrane? Via which process?
Whole class hinge questions
Whole class hinge questions are asked to the whole class to determine whether all learners have understood a particular fact, related to the learning intentions. The question has to have a correct answer or an incorrect answer, as opposed to being a subjective question.
If learners are answering correctly, you may decide to challenge them further with a more difficult question or simply move onto the next part of the lesson.
If learners are answering incorrectly, you can take the opportunity to clarify misconceptions or introduce a different activity to help them. Another idea is to put learners into pairs, one who got the answer correct and one who got the answer incorrect. This encourages peer learning.
Top tip: remember to give learners thinking time and encourage every learner to give an answer.
Two stage tests
In this suggestion, we are encouraging self and peer assessment. You might decide to ask your learners to complete a short test. It could be an informal test, which learners complete individually and then check their own answers against a mark scheme.
Then, you could ask learners to complete the same test in a group with only one test paper between them, immediately after the individual test. This is a great way to encourage learners to interact with one another, provide feedback and decide on answers together.
The content for this article is taken from Dr Karen Angus-Cole’s recent talk at our Be Ready for the World conference. If you would like to find out more visit our website to discover the Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary series.
