Assessment
Assessment Overview
Assessment is a continuous process and an integral part of teaching and learning. It is central to helping children make progress, as it allows teachers to identify pupils' strengths and identify next steps. Assessment allows us to unpick pupil achievement and to look at areas for improvement.
At Minworth Junior and Infant School, assessment is seamlessly incorporated into all lessons. Formative, diagnostic and summative assessments are routinely used so teachers can identify what children can remember, what they can know and what they can do. This approach ensures children are continually making at least expected progress.
Diagnostic Assessment
We use pre-assessments or retrieval questions at the start of lessons, so that teachers can assess children's recall of prior knowledge, their strengths and skills prior to a lesson. This type of assessment allows our teachers to determine how a lesson many need to be adapted to ensure children achieve the next 'chunk' of learning within a topic or subject.
Formative Assessment
Assessment happens constantly within classrooms. The goal is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by teachers to improve their teaching and by children to improve their learning. Our children are familiar at demonstrating their understanding in the following ways:
- Mini quizzes
- Exit tickets
- Low stake tests
- Mini whiteboards
- Self-assessments
- Identifying mistakes
- Editing and correcting
- Application tasks
- Gap tasks
Summative Assessment
Summative assessments are used periodically to help capture a snapshot of the children’s learning at that point in the year or during that point in the learning journey. The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning which may be compared to a national, or internal, standard or benchmark. Summative assessments can be high stakes, meaning they require a lot from the learner, they include an extended piece of writing, a quiz or test as well as statutory assessments set out by the DfE.
Statutory Assessments:
- Reception Baseline
- Year 1 Phonics Screening Check
- Year 4 Multiplication Times Tables Check
- KS2 SATs
The Assessment Framework Document outlines the assessments which take places across the year at Minworth Junior and Infant School. This captures assessment across both core and foundational subjects. Teachers will assess the children's reading, writing and maths against milestone frameworks. These frameworks have been created to link explicitly to the expectations in the 2014 National Curriculum. Teachers discuss whether a child is 'Working Towards', 'Working At' or 'Working at Greater Depth' within the age related standard.
Foundation Assessments
Teachers use the same assessment process for the Foundation Subjects to ensure that our children know more, so they can do more in each of the Foundation subjects. As with Core subjects (English, Maths and Science), teachers will record children's attainment termly so their progress can be tracked.
- Geography and History – Termly Summative Quizzes
- Science, RE and MFL – Half termly Summative Quizzes
- PE – End of unit assessment by teacher against key criteria
- Art and DT – Termly final piece evaluations
- Music, Computing and PSHE/RSE, – Formative assessment by teachers.