It’s the end of the school year, and many teachers are drowning in marking. It’s a tradition and perhaps we don’t question why we do it – and whether it’s worth it.
Why do we assess pupils at the end of the school year?
| Strong Reasons | Weak Reasons |
| For department/school/trust leaders to check whether their quality assurance and teacher ongoing informal assessment is accurate. If there were concerns about pupils or groups of pupils, you’d hope these were identified prior to the end of the year, but there are always surprises. End of year assessments help leaders plan support and interventions. To report to parents how their child is progressing. Parents should have a realistic understanding of current attainment so that they can support their child appropriately. For class teachers to recalibrate their own internal judgements of attainment with the school’s. Throughout the year, it is likely that colleagues will look at pupil work and observe each others lessons, but this provides a hard reality check on your sense of each pupil’s attainment. | To give feedback to students on their next steps. We almost certainly wouldn’t choose this time of year to give students significant feedback that you want them to act on. End of year assessments are time consuming – the costs outweigh the benefits. Much better value is to assess them in every lesson through your checking and give constant guidance. Saving a big formative exercise until the end of the year is inefficient. |
What are the ‘costs’ of end of year assessments?
If you’ve just marked hundreds of scripts, you’ll be fully aware of the cost of your time. There is also the cost in lesson time preparing your students for assessments, Could you have been doing something more productive.
‘Just Enough’ Assessments
We rarely design assessments so that we get just enough reliable information with the minimum effort. What information do you need before you can be confident that the inferences you want to make about performance is valid?
Good multiple choice questions take a long time to develop (writing ones which really test understanding as well as knowledge retrieval) – the payoff is that they are really easy to mark (or automark) and can be used year on year. Do you need longer answers? Some subjects do. What is the least / easiest to mark that is justifiable. Don’t do more.
In summary:
- end of year assessments are important, but not for giving pupils feedback;
- leaders need information to check students are on target;
- teachers need the data to calibrate their pupil performance radar against other teachers and
- keep your assessments as short and efficient as possible while still getting reliable information to make valid inferences with.
Reading for Learning 