School closures and remote or blended learning mean that it’s more important than ever to understand how much your learners know. Students need to recover lost skills and continue to learn, and you need to know how to make effective lesson plans.
But with so many different types of assessment (many with multiple names!), it can be confusing to know what to use and when.
Below we’ve looked at baseline, formative and summative assessment.
Baseline
- Start of the year/learning stage
- Tests aptitudes and skills, not subject knowledge
- Shows potential, predicts grades, highlights strengths and weaknesses
- ‘Where are my students now and where could they be?’
When we talk about baseline assessment, we will be referring to CEM assessments, which, unlike other baseline tests, are adaptive and therefore give a better picture of an individual’s potential.
In the bullets above, we’ve stated that baseline assessments are best done at the start of a learning stage. This is because a good baseline assessment is a starting point for your planning; it is a snapshot of where a child is at the time of the test. However, there are circumstances when you might want to use them at other times. For example, if you want to assess any gaps that might have formed during remote learning.
Baseline assessments measure the skills that have the biggest impact on future attainment – such as, vocabulary, mathematics skills and logic. They don’t test curriculum knowledge.
The data that you get from a baseline assessment highlights support areas for each of your students. For example, you might find that one or more students have a smaller vocabulary than average for their age. Digging deeper into the data, you can find whether comprehension, word recognition or decoding is the problem and then plan your future activities for those children.
Furthermore, CEM tests allow you to map student performance against others, giving you an average. Teachers find that benchmarking in this way, using a large dataset of similar students, is particularly helpful for assessing how their students are performing.
As the age of your students increase and external examinations become more important, baseline assessments can even predict grades and help you measure how strong your class is under timed exam conditions.
The key thing to remember with baseline assessments is, if you don’t know where someone started, when you get to the end of the year, it will be harder to know whether that student has made good progress.
Formative
- During the year/learning stage
- Highlights what students know while they’re still in the process of learning it
- Shows you if students are on track or if you need to adapt learning plans
- ‘How are my students progressing?’
Whereas baseline assessment is used at the start of a learner’s journey, formative assessment is used to keep them on track. Both help you to make decisions about the next steps.
For example, let’s imagine that a primary baseline assessment pointed out that a student or class struggled with comprehending numbers. In your planning, you ensure lessons focus on improving this skill. You are using the Primary and Lower Secondary Mathematics series, and so you employ the differentiated activities in the workbook for the students who need extra practice.
To assess if this has improved your students’ number comprehension, you could then use the self and peer assessment features in the learner’s books at the start or end of a lesson. These have the added benefit of encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning, building their confidence as they begin to see their progress.
Formative assessment could even be as simple as asking students how they feel about what they have learnt at the end of a lesson. You could use a smile chart like the one below.
Similarly, you could look in the accompanying teacher’s resource for the series and find the formative assessment help for the topic, numbers 1-100.
We use assessment for learning (AfL) methodology in our books to aid formative assessment (formative assessment is the purpose, AfL is the process). In good AfL, there are plenty of opportunities for students to show their learning so that teachers can give feedback. The tips throughout the resources provide ways to assess where learners are on their journey and plan if they need extra help.
Summative
- End of year/learning stage
- Tests knowledge and understanding of curriculum objectives
- Shows what a student has learnt during the course
- ‘How did my students do?’
At the start of the year, you ran your baseline assessment and the data showed your students’ potential for the year ahead. During the year, you have kept track of their progress with regular formative assessment check-ins. Now, at the end of the year, it’s time to see how far they have come with everyone’s favourite part, summative assessment!
Summative assessment, whether internal (end of year tests/mocks) or external (Checkpoint Tests, Cambridge IGCSE, etc.) show you how much your student has learnt.
The beauty of doing a baseline assessment at the start of the year is that you can now compare that data with the summative marks. Did the baseline predict that the student would get a B in mathematics, but after targeting his or her weaknesses throughout the year, they actually achieved an A? You now have the data journey to show the value of your teaching.
And there you have it, the benefit different types of assessment can bring you throughout a whole year. If you would like to know more about the formative assessment help in our primary and lower secondary series, you can browse the books here.
