Best Practice

The fundamentals of assessing your students’ learning

Case studies (assessment) Pedagogy Marking & Feedback Pupil Attainment & Progress
Assessment does not just come after teaching – assessment is teaching. Continuing his series on the lessons we must never forget from our teacher training, Matt Bromley discusses the fundamentals of effective assessment in the classroom


I am lead lecturer on an initial teacher training programme. The course content is useful, not just for those new to the profession, but for all early career teachers and indeed seasoned professionals in search of a refresher.

Over the course of nine articles in SecEd, I am sharing my ITT journey with you in the hope it provides some useful opportunities to reflect on your own professional practice and encourages you to try out some new strategies in your classroom.

By way of a quick recap, in my first article, I set out a list of strategies that all expert teachers have in common. In my second article, I focused on the application of theories and models of learning. In my third article, I explored a teacher’s roles and responsibilities in ensuring that learning happens. In my fourth, fifth and sixth articles, I examined in depth the process of planning learning

And in my previous article I turned my attention to facilitating and delivering learning – how to translate our curriculum plans into classroom practice.

As I explained last time, my thinking on the subject has been heavily influenced by Cognitive Load Theory (or CLT) – a term coined by Dr John Sweller in 1988 (see Sweller, 2017) – as well as by the Multi-Store Memory Model proposed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968. Last time, I shared a three-step learning process and a four-part teaching sequence.

This time, in the penultimate instalment in this series, I would like to look at assessing learning.


SecEd Series: Excellent teaching: Lessons from ITT


Let’s talk assessment

Assessment is, of course, an integral – indeed, one might argue, an essential – part of good teaching. Assessment is not just something that follows teaching; rather, it is teaching.

Broadly speaking there are two ways in which the outcomes of an assessment might be used:

  • Summatively: To identify what a student has achieved at the end of a unit, year, course, or school, and to compare students and cohorts.
  • Formatively: To inform a teacher’s planning and instruction, and to diagnose a student’s next steps and provide them with feedback on which they can act to improve.

Whereas summative assessment is the assessment of learning, formative assessment is assessment for learning because it is a way of providing students with feedback about the progress they have made thus far and about what they need to do next in order to make further such progress.

Formative assessment is also a means through which students might actually learn, not just a guide to future learning. For example, by engaging in classroom discussions, students can deepen their knowledge and understanding and therefore enact a change in their long-term memory (one common definition of learning).

Formative assessment is also a mechanism for providing information to the teacher on which they too can act – after all, teachers use the outcomes of assessments to guide their planning and teaching.

Formative assessment provides useful and useable data that tells them what students know and can do and what they do not yet know and cannot yet do, and therefore proffers intelligence about whether to reteach, recap, or move on.

Assessment data might provide information about the pace of learning and about the order in which learning is sequenced, as well as about the appropriate level of task difficulty.

Professor Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson (2007) posit five key strategies for formative assessment.

  • Clarifying and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success.
  • Engineering effective classroom discussions, questions and tasks that elicit evidence of learning.
  • Providing feedback that moves students forward.
  • Activating students as instructional resources for each other.
  • Activating students as owners of their own learning.

Let’s look at each strategy in turn…


Learning intentions and criteria for success

The notion here is simple: if students do not know what they are supposed to be learning and how their work will eventually be judged, then their ability to learn and make progress will be stymied. Obviously, we want students to know what we want them to learn and to understand what successful outcomes will look like.

This talks to the three processes that are central to formative assessment:

  • Establishing where students are in their learning.
  • Establishing where they are going.
  • Establishing how to get there.

Learning intentions are not the same as activities. Setting out what students will do is therefore not particularly helpful; rather, we should focus on what students are expected to think about and learn.

As Wiggins and McTighe (2000) say, teachers should start from what they want students to know and plan backwards. They also advocate a two-stage process: first, we clarify the learning intentions, followed by the success criteria; second, we explore the activities that will lead to the required learning.


Effective classroom discussions and questioning

Once we know what we want our students to learn and how that learning will be assessed, we need to gather evidence about students’ progress toward these goals. One way we can do this is by planning effective classroom discussions and questions…

In many ways, the art of asking good questions is what good teaching’s all about. Indeed, Socrates argued: “Questioning is the only defensible form of teaching.”

There are two reasons for asking a question in class: either to cause students to think, or to provide information to the teacher about what to do next. The former involves dialogic teaching, which is to say asking questions that encourage discussion, questions that are open, philosophical, and challenging.

The latter involves using closed questions as an assessment tool to provide valuable information to the teacher about students’ learning and progress, about who has “got it” and who has not, and about what needs reteaching, recapping, or developing further.


Activating students as instructional resources for each other

Slavin, Hurley and Chamberlain (2003) argue that activating students as instructional resources for each other leads to large gains. But there are two important conditions that must be met.

First, students must work as a group not just in a group; second, every student must be responsible for his or her own contribution to the group.

A simple way of activating students as instructional resources for each other is to ensure that all work is peer-assessed before it is handed to the teacher. Before a student can submit an essay, for example, they must get a partner to complete a peer-assessment checklist.

Self and peer-assessment of this kind can often be effective strategies – particularly because we want our students to become increasingly metacognitive in their approach to learning – because these strategies:

  • Give students greater responsibility for their learning.
  • Allow students to help and be helped by each other.
  • Encourage collaboration and reflection.
  • Enable students to see their progress.
  • Help students to see for themselves how to improve.


Activating students as owners of their own learning

According to Deci et al (1982), when students are told to take a more active role in monitoring and regulating their own learning, the pace of their progress increases.

A simple method to help students take ownership of their own learning is to give each student a laminated card, green on one side and red on the other. At the start of the lesson, the card is placed on the student’s desk with the green side facing upwards. Once the teacher has given an explanation, if the student doesn’t understand, they flip the card to red. As soon as one student flips the card to red, the teacher selects a student who is still showing green, and that student goes to the front of the class and answers a question that the student who’s showing red wants to ask.

There is nowhere to hide – students are either saying they understand, or they want some help. This means students are constantly required to think about whether they understand or not.

This is an example of metacognition which describes the processes involved when students plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours.


Marking and feedback

So far, I have shared some thoughts on formative assessment strategies, just as I did with my ITT class. But what of marking and feedback? I advise my trainee teachers, when marking students’ work, to consider the following factors:

  • How well has the student understood the task?
  • What does the student know and not yet know?
  • What does the student need to do next in order to improve?
  • How will the student be informed of the required next steps?
  • How can feedback encourage students to review their work critically and constructively?

In short, I said, in order to be effective feedback must embody a mode of progression.

In Assessment for Learning (2003), Wiliam et al say that: “An essential part of formative assessment is feedback to the learner, both to assess their current achievement and to indicate what the next steps in their learning trajectory should be.”

According to Shirley Clarke, meanwhile: “To be effective, feedback should cause thinking to take place.”

The most effective feedback requires small incremental improvements of students’ work. Feedback is most impactful when it is given infrequently – what we might call “quality marking”, given for targeted pieces of work and not for every piece.

There are some key questions that I think feedback should address:

  • Where am I going? What are the goals?
  • How am I doing? What progress is being made toward the goal?
  • Where to next? What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?

Effective feedback is explicit about the marking criteria, provides suggestions for improvement, and is focused on how students can close the gap.

Next time, in the final instalment in this series, I will discuss evaluating learning.

Matt Bromley is an education writer and advisor with more than 20 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher, principal, FE college vice-principal, and MAT director. Currently, he is a public speaker, trainer, school improvement advisor, and primary school governor. He remains a practising teacher and is the lead lecturer on a national ITT programme. Matt is author of numerous books on education and co-hosts the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Read his previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-bromley. Visit www.bromleyeducation.co.uk


Further information & references

  • Atkinson & Shiffrin: Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Vol 2, Spence & Spence (eds), Academic Press, 1968.
  • Deci et al: The effects of performance standards on teaching styles: The behavior of controlling teachers, Journal of Educational Psychology (74), 1982.
  • Slavin, Hurley & Chamberlain: Cooperative learning and achievement. In Handbook of Psychology Vol 7, Educational Psychology, Reynolds & Miller (eds), John Wiley & Sons, 2003
  • Sweller: Cognitive Load Theory: Without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind. ResearchEd, Melbourne, 2017: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOLPfi9Ls-w
  • Wiggins & McTighe: Understanding by Design, Prentice Hall, 2000.
  • Wiliam et al: Assessment for Learning: Putting it into practice, Open University Press, 2003.
  • Wiliam & Thompson: Integrating assessment with instruction: What will it take to make it work? In The Future of Assessment: Shaping teaching and learning, Dwyer & Mahwah (eds), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007: https://bit.ly/2yOXpUP