This week one High School student told me that she ‘could not believe how much [she had] learnt in just one lesson and homework’ and did I know ‘that everything on earth came from supernovas!’ The excitement in her voice made me see my immediate question about supernovas and supernovae for the linguistic pedantry it was, and I kept it to myself. I hope you have had similar conversations with excited and happy children who are learning and enjoying the start of year as much as we, their teachers, are.
To maintain and maximise the learning, we know that it is important to pay close attention to assessing where students are, and to communicating that information clearly to them, and to you. This is a focus for us for this and future years, and we’ll be holding Grade Level information sessions to explain what this means for your child, in his or her grade. For now, consider this problem; imagine we have four students, and we have awarded them specific attainment levels on specific assignments at five points (1 being low, 7 being high):
| Student 1 | 5 5 5 5 5 | mean 5 |
| Student 2 | 3 4 5 6 7 | mean 5 |
| Student 3 | 7 6 5 4 3 | mean 5 |
| Student 4 | 7 a 1 7 a | mean 5 (if you ignore absences) |
| Student 4 | 7 a 1 7 a | mean 3 (if you count the absences as zeros) |
Now we have an assessment level to send home to you, the parents. What level should we send for each student?
A moment’s thought shows that the mean level of 5 gives some information, but here, each 5 tells a different story. Thinking about what level is ‘correct’ raises several points; the most important one being “what do we want the levels to tell us?” and the answer has to be that the levels are there to inform students and parents about a student’s current level of understanding and attainment. In other words, when awarding an overall grade, we are trying to look into students’ minds and see where they are – a tricky business! To give ourselves the best chance of getting it right, we need to take into account all evidence of students’ understanding and attainment – not just these five numbers. Put another way, in order to best inform you about your child, we need to give you an holistic attainment level, not a simple and potentially misleading average level.
So how do we aggregate all the individual pieces of evidence, which include individual attainment levels, to come up with a single holistic attainment level?
There’s no formula. The general point is that we take everything we can into account – paying particular attention to most consistent, most recent evidence. In this case, the questions that immediately spring to mind are:
- were some assignments much harder than others?
- were there any ‘settling in’ issues?
- was the student sick or otherwise unable to show whathe or she knew?
- what is the overall trajectory?
- what is the the quality of contributions to class discussion (in class or online?
- have there been unusual and insightful links between different parts of the course would count more than simple closed responses)?
- what is the the quality of questions asked in class?
There is no escape from the professional judgement of the
teacher – nor should there be – but it is an informed judgement, and one that is not always easy. We’ll be talking to our students and to you about this over the next few weeks. For now I just want to get the ball rolling so that when your children tell you “that’s just a single attainment level, not an holistic attainment level” you don’t think it’s just linguistic pedantry.
