But what is assessment?

A few months ago, I got the chance to catch up with Mary Myatt and talk all things assessment (well, as much as you can fit into about 45 minutes). We covered a range of things and Mary has written about her reflections here, but I wanted to explore one question that we touched on and that’s been bugging me for a while – what is “assessment”? 

I’ve worked in and with a number of different school/trust settings in my career and have had more conversations about “assessment” than I can count. Although these conversations appeared to all be about the same thing, often they were on topics which were wildly different. Some spoke about data collection, others about data analysis. Some spoke about measuring attainment, others about measuring progress. Sometimes we were speaking about marking, and other times feedback. Often, we were speaking about things that lacked a clear theory of change*, and this can lead to problems with workload and teacher autonomy. There are several ways in which Mary and I unpacked this problem: 

1. Firstly, have a clear rationale for why something is done the way it is: why have we set the frequency of marking at X times term/year? In fact, why are we marking? What’s our theory of change? 

2. Secondly, be more concrete with what you’re referring to: are you saying “assessment” but you mean checking for understanding? Are you saying marking but you mean feedback?  

3. Finally, where change in perspectives about assessment are needed, do you have the right culture in place to support it? As Mary has written, "If teachers, leaders, and students trust each other—believing that assessment is about growth, understanding, and professionalism—then practices can evolve beyond performative tick-box routines."

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In this post I’m going to focus on the first point as marking is a particular sticking point for me. Data from TeacherTapp suggests that over a quarter of secondary teachers feel like they spend too much time marking, which jumps to 40% for primary teachers. I’ll admit that this is a lower percentage than I expected, probably because I have some quite strong opinions on the matter (which I’ll do my best to save until the end). I  wanted to understand this discrepancy and get to the bottom of not only why that percentage seemed low, but also why nearly three-quarters of secondary teachers thought they were doing the right amount of marking (in fact 15% said they’d like to do more!).  

In conversation with Dr Stuart Kime he put me onto some research he’d carried out trying to target this idea. The research took a case-study approach of giving teachers a smaller marking load and also encouraging to use verbal feedback in class. The analysis makes for highly interesting reading:  

• Teachers in the intervention group (i.e., those who had a smaller marking load) actually appeared to spend more time marking than those for whom it was business as usual (there is a caveat here that this result was not statistically significant, but forms a crucial piece in this puzzle). 

• Teachers doing less marking often said they felt guilty for two main reasons: firstly  for doing less than their colleagues and secondly for feeling like marking is a way of showing their students they’re valued, so in the absence of marking will students still feel valued?   

• Another theme that came up was anxiety around missing something precisely because they weren’t marking. 

• A final theme was that the purpose of marking was not necessarily about supporting student learning, but instead about making the teachers’ work with the class “visible”.

This final point is crucial, and again supported by wider research from TeacherTapp: 82% of teachers felt students would learn just as much as they do currently, as if they stopped giving written feedback. These pieces of research for me highlights something critical when we think about workload: it is not enough to simply “cut” the required amount of marking. Doing so can lead to a disparity between what leaders think and what teachers are doing, as suggested by research from TeacherTapp: “Classroom teachers are far more likely to say that their marking policy does specify how often books should be marked (52%), but only 34% of heads say the same.” We have to help teachers understand why we’re changing the marking policy and what they can do instead. In essence, it’s not enough to target the actions that teachers are doing, we need to first tackle their beliefs: how can we support them to not feel guilty about cutting down their marking? How can we help ease their anxieties about not knowing their students’ understanding? How can we ensure the purpose of marking is about student learning and not anything else? 

And so we come back to a critical question – why are we marking? As a former maths teacher I would often get my students to mark each other’s end of term assessments because the nature of my subject meant students could mark with highly reliable accuracy, in a fraction of the time it took me. This meant my time was freed up to instead plan high-quality lessons designed around common errors found from a quick sift through of the already marked assessments. So not marking meant my students were getting a better deal because I could spend more time responding to their understanding and trying to fix or consolidate it, rather than quantifying it.  

Clearly that approach won’t be appropriate across all subjects/settings - but maybe it could be adapted? Again this point is worth reinforcing: the critical issue isn’t that my actions changed, it’s that my actions changed because I believed that not marking would be better for my students’ learning than marking, and I had a theory of change as to why that would be the case. 

In my next post, we’ll take a closer look at the different ways we use the word “assessment”, and what we might do to support a move away from assessing student understanding and towards supporting it. 

*A clear and robust explanation of how and why a given action is expected to lead to desired outcomes.