V25s3: Assessing ICT KS3

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 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
• a range of methods for assessing students’ ICT capability.

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.

Introduction

These resources focus on assessing ICT at Key Stage 3.

They look at the statutory programme of study and how the components of this contribute to a student’s progress and assessment.

Assessing pupils’ progress (APP) is investigated in the final resource (Resource 5). This introduces participants to the links between short and medium-term assessment of ICT capability.

1 Exploring the National Curriculum

All students have a statutory entitlement to ICT. This is contained within the programme of study statement produced by the QCDA. The programme highlights four key areas:

• Key concepts
• Key processes
• Range and content
• Curriculum opportunities.

The four areas can also be viewed in the KS3 programme of study document.

In planning for assessment you will need to understand the core components of each of the four areas.

2 ICT levels

ICT level descriptors are provided from Level 1 to Exceptional performance above Level 8. An assumption is made that most students will enter Year 7 at Level 4 or above. The QCDA provide descriptors. The document, National curriculum ICT levels may be more accessible.

3 Planning for assessment

The Excel workbook ICT national programme  is a mapping tool that combines the four key areas from Resource 1, ICT level descriptors from Resource 2 and the statement of statutory yearly ICT learning objectives. The latter can be viewed online or in the document The framework for secondary ICT.

4 Progression in assessment

Guidance on assessment between levels has been provided by The National Strategies. The information can also be viewed in the six documents linked below, focusing on three strands of the ICT programme of study:

• Sequencing, Level 4–5, Level 5–6
• Communicating, Level 4–5, Level 5–6
• Evaluating, Level 4–5, Level 5–6.

5 Assessing pupils’ progress

The preceding resources have largely focused on the assessment of single evidence activities and strands. This resource the short-term assessment processes.

In 2009 the Assessing Pupils’ Progress scheme was launched for secondary ICT. This builds on short-term assessment and aims to provide a wider, even picture of a student’s ability across a range of strands and learning objectives. In respect of Key Stage 3, it also aims to provide a confident judgement of level to offer information for the learning path into Key Stage 4. Support for this is available from The National Strategies website.

APP reduces the assessment areas to three assessment foci (AFs):

• AF1 – Planning, developing and evaluation
• AF2 – Handling data, sequencing instructions and modeling
• AF3 – Finding, using and communicating information.

Using the ICT calculators

The ICT APP calculators use a series of macros and coding to allow teachers to record student progress through the APP AFs. The starting point is the Class list worksheet. Student names can be entered into column A in the usual manner (typed or copied and pasted).

Once names have been inserted, clicking the three blue buttons will in turn place underscores between a student’s first and last names, create an individual student record and link the student’s name to his or her individual record.

Once student names have been entered into the Class list worksheet individual progress is recorded in the student’s worksheet. The only editing that should be undertaken in the Class list worksheet is to add or remove students.

The worksheet has 33 rows preformatted to accommodate all but the largest of classes. If more than 33 students are required you will need to use autofill from row 35 onwards. When a student is removed from the list remember to remove the hyperlink in column A (right click, select ‘remove hyperlink'). Use autofill to reformat the content of the row from columns B to G.

As students create assessed evidence the relevant criterion can then be selected from the drop-down menus in their individual record. Clicking on the blue level button will calculate the student level and transfer this to the Class list worksheet.

Individual records allow teachers and students to see what areas have not been met and what is required for the next level. This may be a useful exercise allied to Resource 4.

Further resources

The QCDA provide guidance and links to third party sites.

The National Strategies have provided a range of curriculum guidance and publications for several years, including the following:

• The general ICT curriculum page
• Specific guidance on assessment and improving rates of progress
• APP resources including highly detailed exemplars of student work across a range of contexts, covering Levels 3 to 8. (The exemplars can also be accessed in a zipped file.)

Background reading

Becta supported research into ICT across a range of topics. In particular the following publications focus on assessment and the use of technology to assess:

• Using technology for assessment
• What is an ICT scheme of work?
• Information communications technology (guidance on resources).

Futurelab is an innovative organization that commissions a range of projects and reports. Specific publications of interest include the following:

• Developing and accrediting personal skills and competencies, this reference is included to develop an understanding that a range of factors contribute to assessing a student. National Curriculum levels progress through qualitative aspects which point to developed personal learning and thinking skills
• Digital literacy across the curriculum
• Mapping levels from yearly learning objectives to APP is illustrated in the interactive document Year 7–9 framework learning objectives, this illustrates how assessment could be mapped across years and levels through focusing on sequencing.

Copyright and use of resources

The original source of documents and references is recognised throughout the Resources section. Source materials may be used for educational purposes. Where materials are used outside of an educational context permission should be sought by originators.

References

Acknowledgements

Authors: Michael Jones

Reviewers: Terry Freedman, Pete Bradshaw

Editor: Matthew Driver