Assessment in secondary geography

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:

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Transcript

An introduction to Assessment in secondary geography

Gary Spruce

Geography teachers in secondary schools expend much time, effort and attention on assessment. It is important therefore that geography teachers understand what assessment is and how it is best carried out in the classroom so that it facilitates geographical learning. By that I mean that assessment should deepen and advance student understanding, skills and independence.

This course has been developed for secondary school geography teachers at the beginning of their careers. It takes a learner-centred approach and starts by looking at how assessment can be integrated into planning to support student progression.

We will discuss different classroom approaches, including questioning and feedback. Also explored will be the role of self and peer assessment and how it supports and helps young people to become independent learners.

Finally, the course discusses the reliability and validity of assessment and how differentiation can help ensure all students make progress.

I’m sure you’ll find these discussions stimulating and positive.

End transcript

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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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .