How assessment can distort the curriculum

Hello Colleague

In the bid to get great outcomes for our young people in public tests and examinations, it’s tempting to do two things:

Reverse engineer the final exams or tests and give these to our young people: we end up with pupils in Year 7 being given GCSE language paper 2 type questions in the mistaken believe this will improve results five years later.

It won’t.

It will just kill any joy for the subject. What’s more likely to get great results is a rich, demanding curriculum all the way through KS3.

The second thing it’s tempting to do is give masses of test and exam practice. While pupils need some practice, in order to get the feel of different questions and likely marks for different types of questions, overdoing the exam question practice is likely to be counterproductive.

It feels counterintuitive to argue for less, surely more practice is better.

What is likely to get better results in the final assessments is a focus on making sure that the concepts are well established as the building blocks for later study.

If we think of Key Stage 3 as the time when pupils are exposed to, engage with and learn some of the big ideas within the subjects, then the job of assessment is to check whether this is happening.

I’ll be talking through some of the options in the second part of KS3 Assessment; Challenges and Opportunities on Wednesday 12th February 4pm If you or your school don’t already have an annual subscription, it’s easy to subscribe and you get access to the popular subject networks and ongoing professional development. £150/free trial.

Until next time

Mary