Learning to Teach Subjects in the Secondary School Series: Learning to Teach in the Secondary School (PDF)

and examinations’, considers assessment as exempli.ed by the GCSE and GCE Advanced Level. This unit links national monitoring of standards with your classroom work, again raising issues of accountability. Public assessments represent vital areas of your work.These examinations grade pupils on a nationally recognised scale and exercise control over entry to both jobs and higher education. Unit 6.2 addresses how national standards are maintained and national grades are awarded. In addition, recent national developments in vocational education (NVQ and GNVQ) are discussed and contrasts made between the assessment methods used for vocational courses and academic courses.

UNIT 6.1 ASSESSMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY TERRY HAYDN

INTRODUCTION

If you want to give someone directions, one of the .rst questions you would ask is ‘Where are you now?’
(Driver, 1994, p. 42)

Assessment covers all those activities that are undertaken by teachers and others to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning. Assessment includes not only setting and marking pupils’ work, tests and examinations but also the recording and reporting of the results. The results contribute evidence to the accountability of schools to parents, the public and government.When the term assessment is used it includes that work involved in recording and reporting results.

There is some research evidence to suggest that sometimes fewer pupils understand the topic after teaching than before the teaching has taken place – all that has happened is that the teacher has slightly disturbed the pupils’ misconceptions and prior understandings, and confused them. (See, for instance, the QED documentary,‘Simple Minds’, about pupils’ misconceptions in science, quoted in Dickinson, 1998, p. 17.) In many lessons, some, many or even all pupils fail to understand some of the things that the teacher is trying to teach. Since there is no direct correlation between teaching and learning, it follows that frequently we are in a position where we are trying to assess to what extent our teaching has been successful, in order to know what to do next.