Severn Teaching School Alliance
Mid term report- Assessment for the New National Curriculum.
Link to GOV.UK - Beyond levels: alternative assessment approaches developed by teaching schools
Link to – NCAR Final Writing Frame Document
Who is involved ?
Seven teachers/ school leader from Primary phase.
Two teachers from KS3/4
Teaching School Director/ LA School Improvement Specialist
LA Teaching and Learning Consultant
LA Teaching and Learning consultant
LA Teaching and Learning consultant
What did the study set out to work on ?
Maths-To produce a set of assessment questions/ activities to enable teachers to judge the reasoning, problem solving, using and applying skills in maths , with a particular focus on Fractions.
To explore placing these assessment questions / activities into a developmental hierarchy based on Solo taxonomy.
Reading- To produce a set of adult led questions to enable assessments to be made of children’s progress in deduction and inference when reading.
To explore placing these assessment questions / activities into a developmental hierarchy based on Solo taxonomy.
To disseminate the outcomes of this research with other schools.
To date what have we found out ?
The group discussed a range of ideas for applying to SOLO to classroom practice.
Maths group- assessment of fractions.
What have we done and why?
- Initially decided focus – fractions, because it is a difficulty in Y7
- Looked at NECTM website – objectives were on the site (but not all of them!!)
- Split the year groups between the group members – one each
- For each group, took each statement and looked at existing resources used e.g.
- test base,
- levelopedia http://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/secondary/math/index.php?category_id=735,
- Nnrich http://nrich.maths.org/frontpage
- NECTM web site (https://www.ncetm.org.uk/
- Began to look at success criteria
- Group realised that on the NECTM web site, some of the objectives were missing or of variable quality
- Y1 and Y2 had far fewer objectives than other years such as Y6
- Group felt there was a potential cross over, so group now needs to moderate & check the bigger picture and streamline it where needed
- The structure of the new n.c. lends itself to turning back on levels and using yearly expectations. NECTM provided a great starting point.
Barriers
- Time is a big barrier
- Choosing the best examples from all of the ideas
- Year 4 not done yet as Y4 resources on the NECTM website yet
- We need someone else to do this initial donkey work!
- KS3 NC is not set out in the same way as the KS1 and KS2 models , could this be broken down into early and later KS3 expecations?
Worries
- Some children may not completely achieve an objective and so how is their success measured, if they don’t meet thresholds for achieving criteria?
- Could children give low level answers (successfully) to all questions and attain a mark which does not reflect their level of understanding
- How would overall achievement show profile across the whole subject / skill areas?
- Reliance on NECTM to do the initial donkey work
Next steps
- Put together each year group guidance to make them fit into one continuum
- Initially get the model for one year group looking reasonable & trial this first.
- Look at Y4
- Next needed to trial the idea with pupils – not do yet.
- Get pupils to have a go at the sample Qs to see what type of response they produce – are they at the appropriate level e.g. recall or deeper reasoning.
- Present this information at a Learning Conference on 27th June 2014.
English group- reading assessment.
- Starting point was taken AF3 ( Inference and deduction) for reading and broke down Into different levels of text related questions as a series of steps.
- The issue is that one simple question could have a variety of sophisticated responses.
- A paper was produced in terms of a range of questions were produced.
- Following this the programme of study was mapped to the new national curriculum framework covering combined age groups. This was linked to the existing assessment levels.
- The group is aware that new performance descriptors will be introduced for Year 2 and Year 6.
- The group are working towards the adoption of an assessment document including SOLO taxanomy, this has been trialled at Sir Alexander Fleming. This document contains the SOLO images, a list of verbs and space to record the books being read. This activity was approached from a listening to story point of view.
- The next stage is for the children to be able to self assess when reading and for adults to be able to ask text specific questions.