Raising student achievement provides individual and societal benefits. The most important skill is the ability to learn and adapt to new situations. Teacher quality has the greatest impact on student learning - the most effective teachers help students learn more in less time. Formative assessment involves clarifying learning goals, eliciting evidence of student understanding, and providing feedback to help students improve. It is important to use evidence of student learning to adapt teaching to meet student needs.

1. Raising Achievement through
Formative Assessment

2. Raising achievement matters
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 For individuals:
 Increased lifetime salary
 Improved health
 Longer life
 For society:
 Lower criminal justice costs
 Lower healthcare costs
 Increased economic growth:
 Net present value to the UK of a 25-point increase on PISA:
£4 trillion (the value of every house in the UK)
 Net present value to the UK of getting all students
to 400 on PISA: £5 trillion

3. There is only one 21st century skill
So the model that says learn while you’re at school,
while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during
your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you
can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable.
They will be obsolete by the time you get into the
workplace and need them, except for one skill. The
one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to
learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right
answer to questions about what you were taught in
school, but to make the right response to situations
that are outside the scope of what you were taught in
school. We need to produce people who know how
to act when they’re faced with situations for which
they were not specifically prepared. (Papert, 1998)
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4. What matters is teacher quality
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 Take a group of 50 teachers:
 Students taught by the most effective teacher in that
group of 50 teachers learn in six months what those
taught by the average teacher learn in a year.
 Students taught by the least effective teacher in that
group of 50 teachers will take two years to achieve the
same learning (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006)
 And furthermore:
 In the classrooms of the most effective teachers,
students from disadvantaged backgrounds learn at the
same rate as those from advantaged backgrounds
(Hamre & Pianta, 2005).

5. What formative assessment is

6. Unpacking formative assessment
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Where the learner is
going Where the learner is How to get there
Teacher
Peer
Learner
Clarifying,
sharing and
understanding
learning
intentions
Engineering effective
discussions, tasks, and
activities that elicit
evidence of learning
Providing
feedback that
moves learners
forward
Activating students as learning
resources for one another
Activating students as owners
of their own learning

7. And one big idea
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 Use evidence about learning to adapt
what happens in classrooms to meet
student needs.

8. To consider …
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 Why are we marking work?
 How are we marking work?
 What should be in place BEFORE you mark a piece
of work?
 What happens DURING the production of a piece?
 What should happen AFTER you’ve marked the
work?
 How are students involved in the process? What
do we expect from students?

9. Why are we marking?
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 Knowing where are students are/how much they
have understood and therefore informing our
planning.
 Encouraging students to value work – nag about
presentation, producing work for an audience.
 Reinforcing connection with students.
 Being able to give personal, immediate feedback
and information about how to make
improvements.

10. Feedback about Learning
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Dylan
Wiliam

11. How should we mark?
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 Formative marking should:
 Be using comments only
 Be selective
 Refer to previous work to indicate progress
 Link to learning objectives
 Remove ego involvement
 Specify something that could be improved and how to
go about this
 CAUSE thinking.

12. BEFORE marking a piece of work
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 Provide checklist/success criteria/model
 Refer to work as a “draft” to promote the idea that
redrafting to improve is part of the process.
 Work must be worth marking. Consider:
 Presentation
 Link to previous targets/wishes
 Checking of work
 Students proofread work and highlight parts where
they’ve met success criteria
 Editors/Checking buddies responsible for checking
before work is submitted.

13. DURING the production of the piece
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 Refer to checklists/success criteria
 Mark/give feedback on plans

14. AFTER work has been marked
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Feedback should have caused thinking so …
 DIRT (Dedicated Improvement & Reflection Time)
 Students act on wishes, complete tasks set, ask
questions, reflect
Teachers:
 Evaluate, reflect
 Plan next steps
 Make adjustments
 Differentiate more effectively

15. TIMING of feedback
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 Should feedback be at the end of a unit/piece of
work?
 Could we do “End of Unit Tests” ¾ way through a
unit to give time for students to act on wishes and
make improvements?
 Students need time to revisit their area for
development before moving on.

16. Next steps
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 Take time to digest the information from today
 Discuss in faculties and consider how far your current
marking and feedback CAUSES students to think and
engages them in the feedback process
 From the “Instead of …” sheet, select some strategies
that you are going to try over the first half-term. What
will work in your subject area?
 Are there strategies that you already use that we can
add to the sheet and share? Thread on Frog – I’d like
everyone to add a strategy or report on one that
they’ve used.