Extract from Guidance to accompany the Standards for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) TDA, 2007

Rationale

Rationale

Secure Assessment for Learning (AfL)* practices enable teachers to monitor and assess the achievements and needs of learners and to plan their teaching effectively. Teachers know that learners will make good progress if they are given regular, constructive and formative feedback. Teachers also recognise the benefits of self and peer assessment, giving learners responsibility for assessing their own progress and deciding what and how to improve. They use national and local pupil performance data to compare the progress and attainment of learners, to set targets, to inform their teaching and to improve learning. A secure knowledge of national assessment requirements helps teachers to prepare learners well for public examinations and qualifications.

*Assessment for Learning (AfL) is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.” (Assessment Reform Group 2002)

Scope

This standard is concerned with the development of trainees’ knowledge and understanding of the purposes and practices of assessment, including the principles and techniques of Assessment for Learning. This knowledge will enable them to use a range of strategies in order to monitor learners’ progress, to intervene in order to raise achievement, and to enable learners to succeed.

Questions to consider

Does the trainee know and understand:

• How to apply a range of assessment strategies in different contexts and for different purposes?
• How and why formative assessment can improve learning outcomes and attainment?
• The value of oral and written feedback?
• The ways that immediate feedback can reinforce learning, challenge understanding, construct ways forward, and help learners to improve
• The impact of their feedback, for example on learner engagement, enthusiasm and confidence?
• The need for learners to understand the purposes of tasks and activities, and how this understanding can support self and peer assessment?
• The benefits of involving learners in the assessment of their own learning?
• How assessment relates to intended learning outcomes?

Cross references

Evidence for this standard may be linked to evidence for assessment against the following standards:

• Q3b (Frameworks)
• Q10 (teaching and learning)
• Q11, Q13 (Assessment and monitoring)
• Q14, Q15 (Subjects and curriculum)
• Q22, Q24 (Planning)
• Q25(b), Q25(d) (Teaching)
• Q26, Q27 and Q28 (Assessing, monitoring and giving feedback)
• Q29 (Reviewing teaching and learning)

Sources of evidence

Trainees will have opportunities to demonstrate evidence of achievement of these standards through various aspects of their work including, for example, through their planning over time, their use of targets, their teaching and record keeping, written evaluations of teaching, case studies and other written materials, evidence of assessment of class and homework, and through discussion of this assessment evidence with tutors and mentors.