The Role of Assessment in Schools

Ray Sumner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135799762
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"The Role of Assessment in Schools" looks at the conceptual aspects of tests and testing and also gives practical guidelines on how to use tests to their best effect. It considers the development of tests, the types and scope of tests, their application and interpretation, and answers questions on who wants testing, whether the test is appropriate or biased, and whether the results are consistent?.

CHAPTER 1
The Increasing Involvement of Teachers in the Assessment of Pupils

The educational climate

There is no need to dwell on the ways in which the educational climate in the UK has changed so markedly over recent years. The move towards comprehensive schooling and raising of the statutory leaving age to 16 in the late 1960s undoubtedly sparked off public debate about school organization and the curriculum which, until recently, has overshadowed the more private concerns of parents about the quality of schooling received by their children. The decline of selection to grammar schools at age 11, which currently affects about 12 per cent of pupils of this age in England and Wales across 33 LEAs, tended to shift the emphasis at the primary school stage from differentiation into groups towards developing each child as an individual. At the secondary stage the growing influence of external examinations reinforced the belief that children ought to get something tangible out of their school experience.

In the 1980s, central government has added its weight to the movement to change LEAs and schools through the acquisition of wide-ranging powers. These include:

• legislation giving parents better access to procedures for appealing against the allocation of their child to a particular school;
• extending the responsibilities of school governors to include the curriculum;
• altering the composition of the governing body to include more parents and promoting the concept of accountability to the community in which schools are located;
• introducing a national curriculum and pupil testing;
• delegating finance and management to the majority of schools.

Previously, a string of committees (Bullock, 1975; Taylor, 1977; Warnock, 1978; Cockcroft, 1982; Swann, 1985) inquired into areas of major importance and produced recommendations aimed at improving standards of attainment. Assessment figures quite prominently in the committees’ recommendations, which LEAs and teacher education establishments read as agendas for in-service staff development. From the standpoint of testing, the 1988 Education Reform Act is unique in that the law requires pupils to be tested towards the end of ‘key stages’ in school education.

Whilst the provisions of the National Curriculum have gained wide acceptance, the proposals for testing remain controversial. Their origins might be traced variously to practice in several States in the USA, to graded tests of proficiency in modern languages, to graded assessments of stage by stage courses in Mathematics, Science, and CDT, developed by the London and East Anglia Examination Board and teams at Chelsea College, University of London; and more remotely, to the graded Music examinations and the motor vehicle driving test. The prevailing notion is that each child should develop to his or her full extent; a desire to which teachers naturally subscribe. Each pupil’s progress will have to be assessed, as a matter of sound pedagogical practice. The National Curriculum makes it possible to have national tests, which lead towards the integration of teaching and assessment as an aid for learning.

The scheme was worked out during the passage of the 1988 Education Reform Act through parliament. A small task group, called the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT), worked to a brief sent to them by the Secretary of State for Education, Mr Baker. Their report (DES and Welsh Office, 1988) supported the most contentious of the Act’s proposals, that is, to test pupils at or near the age of 7 years; and formulated a system for testing pupils at or near the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16 years. Its essence was that assessments would consist of tests or tasks; these could be matched with programmes of study in certain ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects in the curriculum, each embodying sets of ‘attainment targets’ for each age-group; a ten-point scale would differentiate attainment over the five to 16 age range; and the subjects would each be specified by components comprised of attainment target sets.

The group gave priority to the need ‘to show what a pupil has learned and mastered’. The purposes of the system were defined as (i) formative at the 7, 11 and 14 year ages, that is, the information helps with the next stage in learning, (ii) diagnostic or indicative of the need for diagnostic assessment, that is, appraising an individual pupil’s learning difficulties, (iii) summative at the age of 16, that is, showing attainments achieved by that stage, and (iv) evaluative, that is, class, year-groups, school and LEA summaries of results would be prepared and used to examine progress in terms of the National Curriculum. Results would be reported to the interested parties in the following way. Each pupil’s parents must receive a profile of their child’s performance. Except for the seven-year-olds, aggregated results for classes, schools and LEAs must be produced. Those for LEAs must be accompanied by a general statement about the area indicating ‘the nature of socio-economic and other influences which are known to affect schools’. Aggregated results for the seven-year-old groups in a school may be published, but this is discretionary. Prior to administering the national tests, called Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs), teachers will make their own assessments of each pupil (Teachers’ Assessments, TAs). The TGAT also proposed that the assessments obtained from both sources, the SATs and TAs, would be standardized for each age-group by a process of moderation, which would involve all of the teachers taking a part in testing their pupils. The basic idea of moderation (described more fully in the Postscript, p. 215) is that when parts of the national tests or tasks have to be judged as to scale level by teachers, the variations bound to occur because of differing interpretations of criteria and performance can be brought onto a common standard, that is, the variations will be moderated (or alternatively, the tasks will be calibrated). The TGAT were very committed to this aspect of teacher involvement, seeing it as essential for gaining understanding of progress in relation to programmes of study in curriculum areas, but the government’s initial response was not enthusiastic (too expensive, complicates assessment process, undue influence given to teachers). Subsequently, the Schools Assessment and Examination Council (SEAC) in 1989 recommended to the Secretary of State for Education and Science that the SAT results would supplant teachers’ assessments (Halsey, 1989). Whereas the original scheme envisaged testing pupils in all attainment targets, the SEAC recommendation foresaw that some would not be assessed by the use of SATs. The TGAT members had declared their commitment to involving teachers closely in moderating the final assessment by examining SAT results alongside their own. Three of their number reacted to the recommendation to give SAT results precedence by publicly criticizing the move as one likely to diminish the value of the teachers’ own assessments (Allanson, 1989).

The report makes it clear that assessing pupils at other ages is highly desirable, especially when it is aimed at diagnosing individual learning problems. It does not rule out LEA schemes or other schemes schools might have, though it draws some justification for a national system from the multiplicity of testing in schools and LEAs, which shows little consistency as a whole. Secondary teachers will recognize the model adopted by the TGAT as similar to the 16 plus examinations, which combine externally prescribed tests or tasks with internally made teachers’ assessments (using guides to criteria and procedures). With the emphasis given to progress on the National Curriculum and periodic national tests, it seems unlikely that examinations at 16 plus will remain unchanged for the core and foundation subjects; that is, English, Mathematics, Science and Technology, History, Geography, Art, Music, Physical Education and a Modern Foreign Language. For example, these examinations could be rationalized by reducing the total number of different papers produced by the examinations board and broadening the range to accommodate the so-called lower ability pupils.

The implications of implementing the TGAT system in full are manifold, and many are dealt with in later chapters. These include training for teachers in administering tests or tasks and training in making assessments in line with the scale levels according to the matching criteria. In secondary schools, most subject specialist teachers will see this as a sweeping modification to suit a particular system, as compared with the free choice available through the syllabuses and examinations they have had traditionally. The impact will be on schools and classroom organization for testing the 14-year-olds, and on teachers’ time for marking, moderation and reporting.

School systems are bound to change, too, as the phasing of reports to parents and governors will follow on from the testing and data analysis activities. In primary schools, where few teachers specialize, apart from training in the national programmes of study, training in assessing a whole class in several ‘subjects’ will be needed. Though a task given to pupils may embody several ‘components’ (as described in Chapter 3) in more than one subject, the process of assessment will be extremely complex; and it will require managing within the everyday learning/teaching context. Indeed, because attempts were being made to produce SATs which incorporate normal classroom learning features, there was some optimism that the six-and seven-year-old pupils may not even realize they were being tested (Halsey interviewed by Nash, 1989).

Perhaps the most far-reaching implications of the 1988 legislation bear more upon teachers’ relations with the pupils’ parents and the local community, because they can manage within the school how they adapt teaching methods to accommodate the National Curriculum and assessment. The aspect that is less amenable is the public disclosure of assessment results. The comparisons between schools, the LEA and the national norms will be regarded as hot news. Headteachers and governors need to be aware that well-presented information which interprets and highlights pupils’ attainments can help elected members and journalists to appreciate the extent to which pupils have achieved particular standards. They should translate the distributions (percentages of pupils assigned to each scale level) on profile components into descriptions of proficiencies or capabilities, and ought also to discourage crude statistical-type simplifications (for example, averaging all component levels as if they are scores), by illustrating how misleading these methods can be.

The condensed version of the TGAT report issued to schools (1988) said that there was no place in the system recommended for norm-referenced testing (see definitions in Chapter 4). It is true that in a lock-step system of teaching the only criteria taken into account should be those which demonstrate proficiency in terms of the attainment target programme of study for a given level. However, schools may wish to continue with practices which they have found to be helpful. Such practices may be operated parallel to or in conjunction with the TGAT testing system. In the short run, however, the imperatives of teaching the National Curriculum and the workload entailed by the TGAT scheme may combine to exclude other types of testing. This would be a pity, as many effective procedures have been devised, to the benefit of countless numbers of pupils.

Furthermore, the provisions of the 1981 Education Act still apply. The Act epitomizes the trend towards meeting the educational needs of individual pupils. Special education, it is said, should occur for children with significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of the same age, or disability which hinders use of the facilities generally provided. Government advice (DES Circular 1/83) on the interpretation of the legislation distinguished between ‘Assessment in Schools’ and ‘Formal Statutory Procedures’. Arrangements in schools should allow for the progressive involvement of professionals from the class teacher to the head, a specialist teacher, an educational psychologist and the school doctor, with access to others in the health, social and educational services. It was noted that the teacher occupies ‘a key position’ to observe pupils’ responses and identify the child experiencing learning difficulties, and to help meet the child’s needs through various approaches. For a small proportion of children whose needs might be such as to require special educational provision formal assessment procedures can be implemented after the LEA has notified parents of its intentions. Thereafter, a ‘multi-professional assessment’ (MPA) is required (with at least a psychologist and doctor, but with others as relevant) which leads to a ‘Statement’. The primary object of the Statement is the specification of what will be done to help the child cope in educational terms, though the nature of the special provision might well be physical.

The Warnock Report (1978) envisaged that as many as 20 per cent of pupils at some time in their school careers would have learning difficulty, as defined above. For some pupils their learning problems might be only temporary, whereas for others they would change, or persist; hence all pupils identified have to be reviewed periodically. No proportion was estimated for the pupils who would require Statements. In some respects this would be dependent on the special arrangements an LEA could make, as compared with educating children in ordinary schools without additional specialist resources. From the standpoint of teachers it is instructive to know what kinds of information could be called for. The list given in Circular 1/83 includes physical and emotional states, cognitive functioning, communication skills (verbal comprehension, expressive language, speech), perceptual and motor skills, adaptive skills, social skills and interaction, attitudes to learning, educational attainments, self-image, interests and behaviour. The most well-known feature of the 1981 Act is the move away from segregating different categories of handicapped pupils into separate schools or units as far as reasonably can be achieved. A less well-known aspect is that the concept of special needs should be applied to all children including the intellectually able and gifted. (A booklet by Welton, Wedell and Vorhaus, 1982, provides an excellent review of the 1981 Act implications.)

The Act has the effect of involving teachers of all kinds in the identification of pupils and the planning of provision with regard to special needs. The 1988 Education Reform Act reinforces this position through the expectation that the National Curriculum assessment procedures will lead to the identification of the learning difficulties of pupils who do not reach the attainment targets associated with particular ages; thereafter, diagnostic testing or other kinds of assessments will point the way towards promoting further learning. The 1988 Act requires that schools have to make a case to ‘disapply’ the National Curriculum only in the aspects which are warranted by a pupil’s particular learning difficulties. Quite obviously the teacher is seen as the person in the best position to prompt action, and this has to be based upon assessments of the attributes noted above, together with appropriate records. There is thus an obligation on all teachers to have available reasonably accurate and relevant information upon which to base decisions about children’s access to appropriate forms of educational experience. In this context different types of appropriate test results can be an important source of information.

Primary schools have not had the same attention accorded to them as secondary schools in recent years, but there have been pronounced changes in that sector too. One trend has been towards more active parental involvement with schoolwork; another has been renewed emphasis given to ‘the basic skills’, though the school inspectorate has stressed the value of a balanced curriculum which includes science, physical activities, technology and the arts, suggestions now given the weight of law in the National Curriculum legislation. The tension inhering in this situation was evident in LEAs where various age-groups of children (that is, in particular school years) were tested in Reading and Mathematics to gauge how far individual schools, or the LEA as a whole, measured up to or surpassed ‘average’ performance in the basic curriculum. Yet at the same time, LEAs attempted to promote a wider balance in the curriculum through in-service training.

The previous sections show that teachers are expected to be competent at a growing range of tasks, many of them in the fields of assessment and record keeping. In the context of teaching and learning a curriculum a great deal could be done by drawing up work plans which have assessments as an integral part of the course (Engel-Clough, Davies and Sumner, 1984). Doing so entails abandoning many of the routines practised in schools, such as weekly homework or periodic examinations, and replacing them by assessments which serve an educational purpose aligned closely to the objectives of course parts. In other contexts, such as the transfer of pupils from schools in one phase to the next, standardized assessments including tests have a value. Their use might embrace placing pupils into teaching groups, identifying children who may have learning difficulties and planning appropriate curricula.

Changes of the kind described carry the inference that teachers’ skills should be developed accordingly. They also imply that more tests which relate closely to children’s learning are required. These would give immediate information which could aid teaching and also provide helpful background for discussions with parents or colleagues, especially for children with learning problems.

Perhaps the most pressing requirement where teachers are concerned is the know-how to decide whether or not tests can be used effectively in school and classroom situations. A supposition here is that the problems pupils encounter and the decisions inhering in their amelioration are fully appreciated. The question then becomes: how can assessment results be obtained and interpreted, so that the right decisions can be made? The situations are legion but in certain problem areas there are few suitable established tests, whilst in others there is a plethora. The difficulty for the practitioner is that employing a test effectively depends upon knowledge of test characteristics and, in some cases, competence in applying certain techniques. Another pertinent issue is, in comparison with the other kinds of assessment which could be used, why use a test?

CHAPTER 2
Tests as Educational Assessments

Assessment bases

The reasons for using tests are bound up with the nature of the information they yield; and this depends entirely on the features built into a test. One justification which is frequently given is that tests are ‘objective’, and so free of the biases that can affect other forms of assessment. On its own, however, this reason is not sufficient. Also, as we shall see, objectivity is a matter of some debate. What really matters is whether or not a test produces good quality information. In beginning to think about quality we need to ask fundamental questions, such as: who is being assessed; who are the assessors; what do we know about the attributes assessed and how are they defined for testing?

Amongst the many types of educational assessments, tests are the most formalized. At the other extreme are the idiosyncratic impressions gained by a visitor from a short spell in a classroom talking with children. Both of these are information gathering techniques which can suit particular circumstances very well. In the case of tests the questions asked are presented to all pupils, in the same format, with the same instructions and under similar conditio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Increasing Involvement of Teachers In the Assessment of Pupils
• Chapter 2: Tests As Educational Assessments
• Chapter 3: The Scope of Tests
• Chapter 4: Test Types
• Chapter 5: Scales and Their Interpretation
• Chapter 6: Handling Test Data
• Chapter 7: Test Development Methods
• Chapter 8: The Circumstances of Testing
• Chapter 9: Using Tests Purposefully
• Chapter 10: Perspectives On Testing
• Postscript
• References