Designing assessment tasks that will allow students to address the Achievement Standards and content descriptors at an ‘A’ level is important. If we only ever produce tasks that allow for a satisfactory achievement and don’t address the deeper learning aspects of the curriculum we are doing a disservice to our students.
Consideration must be given to formative assessment. How do we assess students lesson by lesson to see where they are at and then provide feedback to move their learning forward? What type of summative assessment will be used and at what points during the topic?
How do we collect evidence of student learning? Documenting student work and keeping it on file in some way is important, examples include:
- Student work books
- Digital portfolios (student compiled or teacher compiled)
- Hard copy portfolios (filing cabinet or take home book)
Portfolios of work are useful at report writing time, they provide concrete evidence of student learning. Looking at a spreadsheet with a grade provides an indication of what was achieved but the sample work in portfolios/student workbooks allows us to write more accurate comments in student reports.
