Introduction

This free course, Assessment in secondary geography, is designed for people who are learning to be a teacher, are in their first few years of teaching, or who are working in an educational setting. It will explore some of the key issues around assessing geography in secondary schools to help you to reflect upon and develop your assessment practice as a teacher. You will also develop a greater awareness of how assessment can be used to help students to become more independent. This course is based on a learner-centred approach to teaching, which is underpinned by a constructivist view of learning – the idea that students will construct knowledge and understanding for themselves as a result of activities and experiences.

Now listen to an introduction to this course by Gary Spruce:

Transcript

As you work through the activities you will be encouraged to record your thoughts on an idea, an issue or a reading, and how they relate to your practice. Hopefully you will have the opportunity to discuss your ideas with colleagues. We therefore suggest that you use a notebook – either physical or electronic – to record your thoughts in a way in which they can easily be retrieved and re-visited. If you prefer, however, you can record your ideas in response boxes in the course – in this case, in order to retrieve your responses you will need to log on to the course.

This OpenLearn course is part of a collection of Open University short courses for teachers and student teachers.