5 How does using TESSA materials contribute to pupil learning?

You can turn the TESSA activities into assessment tasks that can help you to find out whether your pupils have learned the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes described in your learning outcomes. Where this is not possible, you can develop your own assessment tool.

For more information on assessment go to the Key Resource: Assessing Learning. [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

Giving and receiving feedback is an important part of assessment. It is important for you to give feedback to your pupils so that you can share what they did well, what they did not do so well, and how they could improve. Remember to use this feedback to plan subsequent lessons, activities and assessment.

You should also give your pupils an opportunity to give feedback on the assessment task so that you can find out whether they thought the assessment task was appropriate/not appropriate, easy/difficult, and any problems they may have encountered.

TESSA Snapshot: Reviewing and amending assessment approach

Mrs Jessica Onyango, a teacher in Ghana, was disappointed with her pupils’ performance in the assessment task. She reviewed their written responses and realised that many pupils had misunderstood the instructions.

In her next lesson, Mrs Onyango gave feedback to her pupils explaining that they had misunderstood the task because they had not paid sufficient attention to reading the instructions clearly. Mrs Onyango now wanted them to go through the assessment task before they started and underline all the action words, for example, ‘describe’, ‘explain’, ‘name’ and ‘list’, so that next time they would be clearer about the tasks they needed to undertake in the assessment.

The next time Mrs Onyango assessed her pupils’ learning she gave her pupils time to read the whole task and underline all the action words before beginning the assessment.

4 How can you teach using the TESSA materials?

6 What do you think you learned from teaching with TESSA materials?