Consequential validity and primary writing assessments
What impact does assessment have on teaching?
In many cases, the form of the final assessment ends up determining a lot of classroom practice. The risk here is that if we have a final assessment that is relatively narrow, it can end up narrowing the taught curriculum too. We have to evaluate assessments not just by the reliability of the information they provide, but by the impact they have on teaching and learning.
On this score, the interim frameworks have been extremely damaging. The statements in the framework have led to all kinds of distortions, summarised well by Michael Tidd, here, and Solomon Kingsnorth here. In the extreme cases, teachers were designing lessons on zombies and horoscopes as a way of shoehorning in activities on the passive voice and modal verbs.
Comparative judgement is much less distorting because the judgement at the heart of it is a holistic one: ‘which is the better piece of writing?
Still, there are many different ways to use comparative judgement, some of which we think are more effective than others. We don’t recommend that you judge your scripts and then go back and add a written comment at the bottom of them! Not only does this wipe out the efficiencies of comparative judgement, it also leads you back to the dependency on prose descriptors. We don’t recommend that comparative judgement is used more than two or three times a year: pupils need time to improve, and writing is a complex domain where improvement takes time. We also don’t think that comparative judgement style tasks should be used in every lesson: pupils need to focus on different aspects of writing in different lessons.
So what do we recommend? We like the idea of judging as a group of teachers, and then meeting to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of what you’ve read. We also like the idea of whole-class feedback, as illustrated by the proforma below, where teachers use their insights from judging to plan a lesson which will allow pupils to respond to their strengths and weaknesses.
The short-term potential of comparative judgement is that it can provide more reliable results in a more efficient way. The longer-term potential is in the impact it can have on teaching and learning. If you no longer need descriptors to assess, do you need them to teach? If you don’t need descriptors to teach, what could you use instead? If you were confident that you had two points in the year where you could get a reliable grade for writing, how would that free you up to teach differently in the interim? If you have assessments that allow you to measure progress, what interventions would you like to trial and test out?
