V25p2: Assessing ICT KS2

Course information

This is one of the ‘project courses’ from Vital. It provides an opportunity for you to plan, carry out and evaluate a project in your classroom. It is supported by a set of resources and activities to give you ideas for possible projects. You are not expected go through every resource but to pick those which are most relevant to your interests, context and possible project.

You will need access to:

• a computer with a web browser
• headset (including microphone and speakers) for online tutorials (optional webcam)
• a class/group of students – groups could be within classes, whole classes, or groups across classes (e.g. clubs) and schools (e.g. clusters of schools or in collaborative projects).

Duration of the course: You should allow for about one to two hours per week for this on top of the time taken to do the project in your classroom or other setting.

Learning outcomes

N.B. The technology or technologies to be used are identified in the Resources section for the course.

Professional and reflective practitioner skills

At the completion of this course, you should be able to:

• identify opportunities for the assessing students use of ICT
• reflect on, and discuss, the methods used for assessing ICT
• reflect on, and discuss, the impact of assessment of ICT on learning
• share your learning with others in your field.

Practical skills

At the completion of this course, you should be able to:

• use a variety of means for assessing students' ICT capability.

Knowledge and understanding

At the completion of this course, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

• the range of assessment types and their applicability to ICT capability, including diagnostic, formative, peer, ipsative and summative.

Cognitive skills

At the completion of this course, you should be able to:

• critically review the assessment process in respect of ICT capability
• share these reviews with others, constructively critiquing others' views.

Course schedule

Introduction

The course applies a practitioner research model to look at how aspects of learning may be supported and enhanced through the use of technology. Your starting point is ‘a need’ within your practice, which you will investigate how to address. This will involve exploring how other people have already attempted to address a similar need in their practice (bringing in some practical examples of how particular technologies are used in schools), before you plan and implement their use in your school and reflect and discuss what worked and what needs further refinement.

At the heart of your learning is a project that you will carry out in your teaching and learning setting. These materials are written assuming that you have signed up for a course, although they can be followed in self-study mode. Where you have signed up for a course you will be carrying out a project with similar focus to others, both in terms of the phase of education, technology and the curriculum.

Throughout you have an opportunity to share experiences with other participants. Where you have signed up to use these materials as part of a course you will have a facilitator who will conduct tutorials and help support you in your learning and reflection.

The Practitioner Research Cycle

Vital courses are based on a Practitioner Research Cycle as shown in the diagram below.

This cycle draws on, and develops, personal and professional knowledge bases. The latter may be seen in the literature, resources, policies and other materials that are used to inform practice.

Throughout the course small icons will indicate the stage of the cycle being addressed.

NB Prof/Pers KB = Professional/Personal knowledge base

Introducing ourselves

For the purposes of clarity the activities from this point on assume that you are on a course with others. If you are in self-study mode then some activities will not be applicable.

This part of the course provides an introduction to each other, to get a feel for the contexts others are working in. This may allow for cross-fertilisation of ideas in projects and for supported reflection.

Using the course resources in your project

These materials, are complemented by supporting resources and activities, which you can use to support your project. Your facilitator, and others on the course, will help to you to plan and refine your ideas for this project.

The project

Having developed your plan on how to use the supporting resources in your classroom you now need to carry out the project. This will last for about half a term. Each week, as you work through the project, you should reflect on what you have learnt and the impact it is having on learners. You should be prepared to share your thoughts and reflections with others.

Reflect, evaluate and share with others

Having carried out a classroom project, you will share your reflections of what you learnt from it.

Use the key questions below to help evaluate your project. Use your initial planning sheet and the reflections you have captured as a source of data to help you do this.

• What did the learners do? This is a descriptive activity that explains your action with the learners.
• What did they learn and how do you know? This is an issue of assessment including observation, discussion, question and answer, testing, etc
• Was it worthwhile, i.e. did it succeed in meeting your targets? This question relates to your purposes and intended learning outcomes.
• What did I do? Practitioner research is often done by individuals in their own work. This question requires a description of your own actions.
• What did I learn? This requires analysis of your data and reflection on your answers.
• What do I intend to do next? This relates to your next steps for action. This is where you will try to do things to achieve an improvement and to make the work you do with learners more worthwhile in your terms.

Adapted from Open University Curriculum in Action materials (1981)

Shared learning

The reflective practitioner cycle is based on developing the professional knowledge base. We have come to the end of the personal reflection phase and will now develop a common understanding of what we have learnt. We will share the key learning points as a group so that these may be collated and added to the community knowledge.

Evaluation

This final section allows for evaluation.

Resources

You do not need to do all the activities contained in this Resources section. Select those that are most appropriate to your context, interests and possible projects.

Where possible we provide links to materials hosted by Vital. However, this is not always feasible so please bear in mind that over time material from external websites may become unavailable or obsolete.

1 Exploring assessment

You should refer to the QCDA attainment target for ICT or open the document QCDA curriculum attainment target for ICT.

• Open the document Reviewing learning outcomes part 1.
• Consider the worksheet on the second page which has been adapted from an actual scheme of work and was used for classes of mixed ability pupils who had just left their primary school and were in their first three weeks of the Autumn term.

  It is helpful but not essential to have a colleague with whom you can discuss the points and consider what you would have done differently in your school.

• When you feel you feel ready, move on to Reviewing learning outcomes part 2 which will help you consider how to improve learning outcomes and assessment.

Underlying concepts

2 Assessment as a tool for improvement

Look at the Teachers' TV video, http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/ videos/ action-teacher-video-primary (there are three videos, the relevant part starts at about 18 minutes), and this account of a school peer assessment, project http://www.teachingexpertise.com/ articles/ two-stars-and-a-wish-1394.

‘Two wishes and a star’ is a technique for encouraging children to reflect on their own and others’ learning through the use of peer feedback. The ‘two stars’ form the positive feedback on a piece of work and the 'wish' indicates where development could be made. What might ’Two Wishes and a Star‘ look like in your ICT lessons?  What technologies might support some of the assessment types and feedback/informative assessment?

You might use the prompts described in the article, How ICT resources can support learning at primary level.

• How does your school currently use ICT to support assessment for learning? Is ICT used purely to record information or do you use ICT to review performance and identify areas for improvement? Do you use ICT to set children specific tasks in order to inform them of a child's current understanding of a learning objective? For example, do you set tasks for which children use an interactive teaching programme (ITP)?
• Do you recognise the opportunities that interactive whiteboards can provide for children to give feedback and share ideas? Do you use ICT to model ways for children to review, modify and evaluate their work – for example, within a plenary session?
• Do you use ICT to record and present collaboratively children's feedback and ideas?
• Do you use ICT to annotate resources and on-screen files with children's responses and contributions, deepening your own understanding of the next learning and teaching stage they will need to plan?
• Do you use ICT tools to record scrutiny of children's work in order to identify areas of weakness and targets for improvement? For example, do you use Excel to record children's achievement across a particular standardised assessment task?
• Have you reviewed your current methods in terms of effectiveness at teaching, child and school improvement level?

Underlying concepts

Assessment plays a key role in how teachers teach and how students learn. The best forms of assessment combine data analysis with ways of getting to know pupils and understanding their educational needs more fully: at an individual, subject, class, school and Ofsted level. Whole-school self-evaluation is now a key part of school management as a tool for looking at how different groups of pupils are performing in different subjects, measured against their age peers, personalised targets and, in national exams, across the country.

Teachers have access to an unprecedented provision of data that will help monitor and evaluate the progress of the range of pupil ability. There are different approaches to assessment that teachers need to evaluate.

Assessment benefits

Assessment techniques

The type of assessment you use depends on what you want the assessment to achieve; effective assessment should:

• take account of different learning styles
• be consistent in its approach using the same techniques with all pupils
• involve pupils and take account of their opinions
• help colleagues to assess their own teaching and develop formats for pupils to be able to assess teachers sensitively
• share information across year groups
• achieve continuity, using a variety of assessment methods.

Further background resources

• Becta self-review framework: Element 4, Assessment of ICT capability

• Primary special needs – using ICT, this thought-provoking video focuses on how to use ICT for special educational needs pupils within a mixed ability class – every child in the class is enabled to participate.

3 Formative and summative assessment

Watch the two videos below from Teachers TV.

• Primary assessment – Formative assessment 1
• Primary assessment – Formative assessment 2

Consider the following questions:

• How might you work with pupils to determine the learning intentions?  What ICT tools such as mind-mapping could you use to develop success criteria in a collaborative way?
• Does this kind of collaboration lead to improvement and independent working?  What is the role of formative assessment?

Read the booklet 21st Century teacher or watch the Teachers' TV video about summative assessment.

Consider and if possible discuss with a colleague the following question:

How do you identify the ICT standards pupils are working at in order to inform parents as part of the child's report?

Underlying concepts

Summative assessment involves measuring what has been learned through formal assessment. Formative assessment in its widest sense refers to any process by which pupils are made aware of how they can make progress. Summative assessment requires careful record keeping, whereas much of the formative assessment process may not be recorded by the teacher, though it may be an aspect of personal learning planning. Black and Wiliam’s influential Black box  literature identified key strategies shown to improve pupils' learning.

Many strategies can be said to help pupils understand where they are in the learning process, what progress they should aim for and how to make that progress. Studying the issue of gender may be helpful in some situations, in considering formative assessment strategies with boys, for example; understanding of emotional intelligence, or learning styles may be more useful for many teachers.

Formative assessment

Formative assessment is most effective, when there is a whole-school approach to it, with colleagues sharing best practice and planning for improvement.

Emphasis on formative assessment has the following effects:

pupils learn more effectively

some pupils feel more involved in ICT and become less disaffected

ICT teaching is focussed more effectively on the individual pupil

positive effects may be particularly evident in the less able

learning in the wider cross-curricular sense can be enhanced.

Black box research identified key elements of formative assessment:

• The task should take account of prior ICT learning and clearly understood by the pupil.
• The way in which they will be judged should be clearly understood by pupils.
• Pupils should be aware of where they stand at the beginning of the task.
• They should have a clear understanding of the ICT goal and how to achieve it.
• They should be given opportunities to set their own goals.
• They should have opportunities to make real decisions and choices.
• Models of good work should be provided for pupils.

Summative assessment

Summative assessment considers learning that has taken place over a period of time. This is usually at the end of a unit of work or period of time such as a half term. It can be internal to the organisation such as pupil records and to inform reports or be external in the form of statutory tests or examinations.  Summative assessment may be considered assessment of learning while formative (or informative) assessment is regarded as assessment for learning.

Summative assessment should review pupils' capability and provide a best fit level.  Use of integrated projects or open ended tasks provide opportunities for pupils to demonstrate capability in relation to a half or whole term's work i.e., over one or two units of work.  It should include pupil review and should identify next steps.

Current national expectations for pupil progress in ICT state that at the end of Key Stage 1 the average child will be operating at level 2 and at the end of Key Stage 2 level 4. See the documents Progression in ICT  and Primary APP standards.

Summative assessment should be recorded for all pupils – showing whether the pupils have met, exceeded or not achieved the learning outcomes.

Agreement trialing for tracked pupils should be run to support this process (teacher annotation) is helpful in this context.

Assessment records should be used to inform planning by current and future teaching staff.

Types of summative assessment include:

• tests and examinations
• marks awarded at the end of a project or unit of work
• pupil records
• end of year grades that feed into reports
• portfolios of work
• formative use of summative assessment
• analysis of summative assessments such as ICT tests can be used to guage strengths and weakness of individual pupils and the class and can inform curriculum planning to ensure any errors, misconceptions or gaps in curriculum coverage are addressed.

NC in Action uses pupils' work and case study material to exemplify discrete and cross-curricular ICT in practice.

Further background reading

• Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement, moving towards online reporting: Toolkit for primary schools
• Getting to grips with Assessing Pupils' Progress
• Learners’ charter (Futurelab)
• Formative assessment and implications for classroom practice
• Personalisation and digital technologies

4 Assessing higher levels

Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes  can be mapped to software use both individually and collaboratively. The table shows how this might apply to the levels of knowledge, analysis and evaluation. What might the software use to demonstrate comprehension, application and synthesis?

Adjust an activity you are about to teach in order to obtain evidence of pupils' higher level thinking skills. Can they design and implement an ICT system for others to use? What might this mean?

Overview of underlying concepts

ICT is a powerful means of developing pupils' higher thinking skills. In KS2 pupils may meet a ’glass ceiling’ of assessment (‘most pupils can‘) at level 4/5. This resource explores how teachers can find evidence of pupils working beyond level 5 – how classroom activities might be adjusted to encourage higher thinking and how to obtain evidence where pupils may not be able to fully articulate a description of what they are doing and why. Simple examples might be as follows: Is a pupil teaching others (including the teacher) how to use and apply a piece of software? Does the pupil use ICT creatively outside of school and is this captured as part of assessment?

Why do we use questioning?

• To interest, engage and challenge pupils.
• To check on prior knowledge.
• To stimulate recall and use of existing knowledge in order to create new understanding and meaning.
• To focus on key concepts and issues.
• To extend thinking from the concrete and factual to the analytical and evaluative.
• Applied to ICT it can establish how well pupils understand the context of what they are doing: if they can analyse needs, data and required outcomes, design, refine and demonstrate a solution and evaluate it against the original context/analysis.

For deeper learning and development of higher thinking skills, questioning is to lead pupils through a planned sequence which progressively establishes key understandings, to promote reasoning, problem solving, evaluation and the formulation of hypotheses and to promote pupils' thinking about what they have learned.

There are various classifications of higher order thinking skills. Bloom's Taxonomy is probably the best known.

Planning for questioning

• Ensure examples of effective questions are included in your planning.
• Use resources such as Bloom's Taxonomy to ensure you are asking higher order questions.
• Share key questions at the beginning of the lesson and base the plenary on these questions .
• Stop during the lesson to check whether these questions are being answered.
• Ensure there is a balance between asking and telling.

Ask open questions:

• Make sure some questions have more than one answer.
• Follow up answers with words and questions like 'Explain'. 'What makes you think that?' to provide greater challenge, encourage speaking at greater length and depth.
• Ask pupils to set their own questions.
• Use techniques such as 'what do you know about?', 'what questions will help you find out?', 'how will you find out?'

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behaviour important in learning. Bloom found that over 95% of the test questions students encounter require them to think only at the lowest possible level – the recall of information.

Bloom identified six levels within the cognitive domain, from the simple recall or recognition of facts, as the lowest level, through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels, to the highest order which is classified as evaluation. Verb examples that represent intellectual activity on each level are listed here:

• Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorise, name, order, recognise, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state.
• Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognise, report, restate, review, select, translate.
• Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatise, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.
• Analysis: analyse, appraise, calculate, categorise, compare, contrast, criticise, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.
• Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write.
• Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.

When designing content, the taxonomy can be used as part of a holistic approach to learning and development, rather than as a linear model.

See Bloom's Rose.

As teachers we tend to ask questions in the ‘knowledge’ category 80–90% of the time. These questions are not bad, but using them all the time is. Try to utilise a higher order level of questions. These questions require much more ‘brain power’ and a more extensive and elaborate answer.

Look at Bloom's critical thinking across the curriculum 2, focusing on the diagnostic questions. Also look at Bloom's taxonomy in practice –  a hierarchy of thinking skills. The Bloom's levels map easily to National Curriculum levels for ICT and share the same language.

Computers and thinking

Research shows that there are several ways in which ICT could particularly enhance the teaching and learning of thinking skills. There is evidence that the use of computers can lead to improved information-processing skills. ICT enables multiple and complex representations of information, allowing learners for example to think with a richer knowledge base. As James aged 8 said: 'I didn't know there was so much to know!'

Educational software can act like a teacher to prompt and direct enquiry through asking questions, giving clues and suggesting avenues of investigation. It can also act as a resource while learners discuss and explore ideas, prompting reflection around a simulation for example. Networks via the internet and including video conferencing, can allow children to engage directly in collaborative learning and knowledge sharing with others who are not physically present.

The main criticism of the computer as a tutor model is that directed computer teaching does not allow children to be creative learners, able to think and make connections for themselves, and so is unlikely to support the development of higher order thinking. This can be transformed however by collaboration around ICT activities, which has been shown to have the potential to enhance the learning of transferable thinking skills.

Computers can help develop children's thinking skills when used as part of a larger dialogue about thinking and learning (Wegerif, 2002).

Background reading

Blooms digital taxonomy, this provides an updated view of Bloom's taxonomy to take into account the digital world.

NC in Action is an excellent source of examples of leveled work although higher levels are rare.

References

Acknowledgements

Authors: Allison Allen

Reviewers: Terry Freedman, Pete Bradshaw

Editors: Helen Coolen, Matthew Driver