E14 - Assessment

In this episode Femi and Matt dive into assessment – specifically how they use short but frequent class tests to inform planning and teaching, and to maximally support student progress.   They compare their different approaches and see how these arise from having slightly different objectives.  They discuss some guiding principles of testing – what they consider to be good and bad practise, including a few words on question level analysis, debate the pros and cons of teacher marking vs self-checking, and deliberate on the extent to which students making corrections or copying down the correct method actually translates into sustained improvement in the absence of further extended practise.  Finally they also touch on summative assessments and share their views on set changes.