Michael Tidd

How to get assessment wrong

2015-05-21T10:45:22+01:00May 20th, 2015|assessment|

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Søren Kierkegaard With the freedom to replace National Curriculum Levels with whatever we want, there's a wonderful opportunity to assess what students can actually do rather than simply slap vague, ill-defined criteria over students' work and then pluck out arbitrary numbers as a poor proxy for progress. But there's also an almost irresistible temptation to panic, follow the herd and get things badly wrong. Levels are by no means the worst we could do - in fact there was [...]

Does it do what it's supposed to? Assessing the assessment

2014-04-06T06:22:54+01:00April 6th, 2014|assessment, English|

In response to a request for constructive criticism of the English assessment model I helped design, Michael Tidd got in touch to query whether it met his 7 questions you should ask about any new ‘post-levels’ assessment scheme. For the record, these questions are: Can it be shared with students? Is it manageable and useful for teachers? Will it identify where students are falling behind soon enough? Will it help shape curriculum and teaching? Will it provide information that can be shared with parents? Will it help to track progress across the key stage? Does it avoid making meaningless sub-divisions? My initial response [...]

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