4. Reviewing outcomes
Bespoke assessment
Both formative and summative assessment play vital roles in our children’s education. But we need to consider carefully the purpose of each assessment to ensure we are collecting the evidence we need to unlock our pupils’ full potential.
Formative assessment helps us respond to our learners’ needs as it provides us with the information we need to decide next steps. Summative assessment is assessment of learning as it provides evidence of achievement at the end of a teaching sequence.
Tests can provide an important source of detailed, individualised feedback. They help identify gaps in knowledge and where a pupil needs to deepen understanding of what has been taught. When used in this way, summative assessments provide a useful source of information to improve pupil performance. They are being used formatively as a key progress indicator rather than an end point to learning.
A good assessment will…
Identify pupil strengths
Highlight gaps in learning or misunderstandings
Inform next steps
To get the most out of any assessment, we think carefully about what we want to find out. For example, do we want to check what skills our pupils are having difficulty with or whether or not they can apply their understanding in a range of contexts? Once these decisions have been made, we work out what evidence needs to be collected and the most efficient way(s) of doing so.
If the purpose of an assessment is to evaluate the learning that has taken place in class, then the assessment that is set must accurately reflect what has been taught. The key benefit of bespoke assessment is that teachers can tailor it to do just that.
How does Testbase support you?
Testbase enables teachers to create their own bespoke assessments with ease. Our simple yet powerful search tool allows you to filter by a range of criteria to find the questions you need. The questions can be compiled into documents which can then be exported for editing and printing or saved and shared with colleagues, parents and carers via the generated URL. Shareable web-links are ideal for homework or remote learning tasks.
Ready-made assessments have also been developed by our curriculum and assessment experts and are freely available to all Testbase subscribers. These can be used as they are or adapted for different needs and purposes.
“[Testbase is] an invaluable bank of questions that can be used extremely flexibly across all age groups and all maths topics. Brilliant in terms of being able to put bespoke sets of questions together on a specific topic and to really test pupils’ depth of understanding.”