What is assessment for? whom does it benefit? what can we reasonably expect from our assessments? if only these questions were always asked….
Assessment as certification has been with us for a very long time, enabling employers and academic institutions to have a rough guide to an applicant’s skills or potential and giving applicants a set of transparent targets to aim for. Success has never been guaranteed by those certified attainments however, interviews always follow as a way of cross-checking that an applicant is suited to a post or course, an implicit acknowledgement that certificates are not in and of themselves a reliable guide to someone’s abilities or suitability for anything.
It has always been apparent that our methods of mass testing have been inadequate, the results unreliable: the law had to be changed to allow pupils at secondary modern schools to take GCE examinations in their school as it became apparent that so many of them were already gaining GCE ‘O’ levels after they had been specifically selected at 11 to go to schools where they would not do such a thing because they were unable to do such a thing. It was later realised that by age 14 as many as 20% of the pupils in grammar and secondary modern schools were in the ‘wrong’ school, because their God-given, unalterable and above all measurable IQs had mysteriously altered. The key lies in the word: measure, to assign a numerical value to - even if it is expressed in various combinations of alphanumerics. People talking about education often refer to assessment when they actually mean measurement. The former involves an awareness of the person being assessed, the latter involves generating a number or something easily converted to one.
The SATs system has evolved with even more strangled logic than the poor old GCEs, which were actually designed by universities to progressively weed out candidates for university education. Employers simply highjacked them for their own purposes, as they were the only indicator of educability widely available. Almost by accident, the earliest Key Stage 1 SATs (when the T was for Task, as I recall), made a fairly good fist of assessing what children could do but they were so labour intensive, time consuming and hence expensive that they were quickly abandoned. SATs were never intended to do anything for children anyway, assessment was not what the government of the day or any since was actually after. They needed to be seen to be doing something about raising standards, they needed a measurement system for schools and teachers. This would then allow for all the trappings of the target culture, particularly annual tests enabling league tables, which, coupled with the less explicit excesses of the educational inquisition which OFSTED became, would ‘drive up’ standards. The language said it all – there was an assumption that teachers did not really want to improve standards, they had to be driven. Standards were identified, targets set. Failing teachers, schools and Local Authorities could be identified through the power of the graph, the cold certainty of the numbers rather than the wordy, subjective view of old fashioned inspectors.
The ’97 change of government only made things worse because they were prepared to put money into all of this, so, along with smaller class sizes, a massive influx of technology, a boom in TAs etc they also brought in endless costly initiatives aimed at ‘driving up standards’, coupled with the expansion and entrenchment of a massively expensive and completely useless ‘assessment’ system. Teaching, pupil progress, the value for money of an LA were now all redefined so that they could be measured and the expenditure justified.
Showing posts with label Primary Assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Primary Assessment. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Assessment 2 What are the results?
Does it really matter what assessment/measuring has become, as long as we get on with the teaching? Well, yes, it does, because it permeates the nature, purpose, outcomes and effects of our education system.
Teaching to the test has become the norm in Years 5 and 6: when decisions have to be made on what to teach, how to deploy staff, the emphasis that will be put on anything, the most powerful consideration is always the impact on SAT levels. This is hardly surprising. Judgments on primary schools’ effectiveness are principally made on the basis of their SAT results, so schools naturally force those results to look as good as possible by forcing their teachers to do the same. Pupils and staff are bullied, a climate of fear is created in schools and LAs, there are endless (apocryphal?) stories of cheating, the entire curriculum and allocation of human resources in the year leading up to the test is skewed to get the results. Children not likely to look good in the results are effectively abandoned, expensive interventions are forced on borderline children to squeeze them into the sausage skin of a level 4 at KS2.
Pupils and their parents are consistently lied to about the importance of the tests the children will face. Half an hour spent browsing the educational shelves in WHSmiths gives an insight into how publishers push their expensive aids, often using the word ‘pass’ in relation to SATs: the fear spreads to parents. Families at my school can’t afford private tuition but I would bet my pension that there are large numbers of tutors at work in this country helping to prepare children for SATs.
What do we do with the SAT levels generated at such financial and human expense?
KS2 SAT levels are only used as a rough guide to anything by secondaries because they know how unreliable they are. I dread to think how many KS3 children at a new school have been placed in entirely inappropriate courses, groups or settings because of inflated SAT results. At a school I know, a secondary phoned up to check that they had just welcomed the correct child who had a SAT level 5 in English, but was working at a real level of low 3, the child even had some indications of dyslexia! As to variations between feeder schools for secondaries, the sky's the limit! Teacher insecurity, management’s craven attitude to OFSTED, league tables, coaching and the look good culture make KS2 SAT results unreliable for determining any new Y7's level of attainment, particularly in the tested subjects. The practice of extrapolating capability in order to create teaching groups in other subjects is doubly misleading.
End of KS1 SAT levels do not carry over to KS2 within the same primary school: a child with Level 3 at KS1 SAT would not be viewed as such by a year 5 or 6 teacher and would definitely look very alien to a KS3 colleague.
Schools are caught between a rock and hard place: they want their KS1 SATs to look good but then it appears that Years 3 and 4 are years of poor progress (the so-called ‘dip’), some children even go backwards! I was once asked to reconsider my targets for my year 4 class, because they didn’t show enough progression from their KS1 SAT results, I refused but the head changed them anyway.
Education has been distorted and redefined to suit a system of measurement which allows bureaucrats to fit children, teachers and schools into a spreadsheet and measure them to 2 decimal places. I for one am truly sick of it.
Teaching to the test has become the norm in Years 5 and 6: when decisions have to be made on what to teach, how to deploy staff, the emphasis that will be put on anything, the most powerful consideration is always the impact on SAT levels. This is hardly surprising. Judgments on primary schools’ effectiveness are principally made on the basis of their SAT results, so schools naturally force those results to look as good as possible by forcing their teachers to do the same. Pupils and staff are bullied, a climate of fear is created in schools and LAs, there are endless (apocryphal?) stories of cheating, the entire curriculum and allocation of human resources in the year leading up to the test is skewed to get the results. Children not likely to look good in the results are effectively abandoned, expensive interventions are forced on borderline children to squeeze them into the sausage skin of a level 4 at KS2.
Pupils and their parents are consistently lied to about the importance of the tests the children will face. Half an hour spent browsing the educational shelves in WHSmiths gives an insight into how publishers push their expensive aids, often using the word ‘pass’ in relation to SATs: the fear spreads to parents. Families at my school can’t afford private tuition but I would bet my pension that there are large numbers of tutors at work in this country helping to prepare children for SATs.
What do we do with the SAT levels generated at such financial and human expense?
KS2 SAT levels are only used as a rough guide to anything by secondaries because they know how unreliable they are. I dread to think how many KS3 children at a new school have been placed in entirely inappropriate courses, groups or settings because of inflated SAT results. At a school I know, a secondary phoned up to check that they had just welcomed the correct child who had a SAT level 5 in English, but was working at a real level of low 3, the child even had some indications of dyslexia! As to variations between feeder schools for secondaries, the sky's the limit! Teacher insecurity, management’s craven attitude to OFSTED, league tables, coaching and the look good culture make KS2 SAT results unreliable for determining any new Y7's level of attainment, particularly in the tested subjects. The practice of extrapolating capability in order to create teaching groups in other subjects is doubly misleading.
End of KS1 SAT levels do not carry over to KS2 within the same primary school: a child with Level 3 at KS1 SAT would not be viewed as such by a year 5 or 6 teacher and would definitely look very alien to a KS3 colleague.
Schools are caught between a rock and hard place: they want their KS1 SATs to look good but then it appears that Years 3 and 4 are years of poor progress (the so-called ‘dip’), some children even go backwards! I was once asked to reconsider my targets for my year 4 class, because they didn’t show enough progression from their KS1 SAT results, I refused but the head changed them anyway.
Education has been distorted and redefined to suit a system of measurement which allows bureaucrats to fit children, teachers and schools into a spreadsheet and measure them to 2 decimal places. I for one am truly sick of it.
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