Assessment Without Exams: Noticing What Students Can Already Do
The end-of-term examination tells you what pupils could not do, several weeks too late to help them. Here are four ways of finding out sooner.
Examinations are not going anywhere and this is not an argument against them. They serve a real purpose for reporting, for progression and for the expectations of parents and senior monastics. The problem is when the examination is the only assessment, because by the time it is marked, the term has ended and nothing can be done with what it revealed.
Useful assessment is the kind that changes next Tuesday lesson. It has to be quick, it has to happen during teaching rather than instead of it, and it has to tell you something specific enough to act on. Here are four methods that meet those tests in a class of fifty or more.
One: count instead of marking
When you mark an exercise with the class, ask for hands on each answer and write the count on the board. Forty-one pupils chose the correct answer and nine chose the same wrong one: that is a far more useful result than a pile of books, and you have it before the lesson ends. The nine tell you what to reteach, and the fact that they all chose the same wrong answer usually tells you why.
Two: the exit sentence
In the last two minutes, every pupil writes one sentence using the language of the lesson and shows it to you as they leave. You are not marking it; you are reading fifty sentences in ninety seconds and forming an impression. Teachers who do this consistently describe it as the single most useful two minutes in the lesson.
Three: listen to four pupils
During any pair activity, choose four pupils in advance and stand near each of them for a minute. Not to correct, only to listen. Over two weeks you will have heard every pupil in the class properly, which is more than most teachers manage in a term of whole-class questioning.
Keep a simple list with the date beside each name. The list matters because memory reliably over-reports the confident pupils and under-reports the quiet ones.
Four: keep the first piece of writing
On the first day of term, have every pupil write a short piece: five sentences about themselves, or a description of the school. Collect it, keep it, and give it back in the last week alongside the same task repeated. The pupils see their own progress in their own handwriting, which no mark out of a hundred communicates, and you get an honest picture of what a year of your teaching actually produced.
Progress is easy to lose sight of when you see a class every day. Two pieces of writing four months apart make it visible to everyone in the room.
What to do with what you find
The risk with assessment is collecting more than you use. Choose one method, run it for a term, and each time it shows you something, change one thing in the next lesson. A teacher who reteaches one point a week because nine pupils got it wrong is doing more than a teacher with a full record book and no time to read it.
Does this match what you see in your classroom?
We write these from what members tell us. If your experience is different, or you have adapted something here and it worked, that is exactly what we want to hear about.