Summative Assessment enables teachers to evaluate how much of the planned curriculum has been learned by each student. An effective summative assessment provides school with information they can use to monitor and support pupils’ progress, attainment and wider outcomes and, as Daisy Christodoulou states in her book ‘Making Good Progress’ a good summative assessment provides a ‘shared meaning of pupil performance’.
At Fred Longworth our summative assessments have three common features:
Standard tasks in standard conditions
- Summative assessments will be standardised across the faculty.
- Summative assessments will be taken in standardised conditions when students have been taught the required level of curriculum content.
Sample a large domain of content and distinguish among students
- Summative assessments test from that term, and previous terms/years. If they only focus on the current term, then they are not broad enough to provide reliable evidence about student progress in the chosen subject.
Infrequency
- Summative assessments are far enough apart for students to make meaningful improvements.
- Each faculty completes summative assessments approximately twice an academic year, although there may be more in year 11.
Summative assessments which are designed along these principles allow teachers, heads of subject, heads of faculty and senior leaders to judge, with some degree of accuracy, how well a curriculum has been learned.
In addition to internal summative assessments, we also use:
Nationally standardised summative assessments
- We make use of nationally standardised assessments such as CAT4, NGRT and other GL assessments such as the Pupil Attitude to Self and School Survey (PASS) test.
- This provides invaluable evidence to help judge students compared to their peers nationally.
Baseline assessment
- At the start of year 7 teachers use the student’s Key Stage 2 SATs scores to establish the baseline prior attainment of the students. This is then supplemented with the completion of the NGRT reading test within the first 2 weeks. This reading test is repeated at the end of year 7 and then again at the start and end of year 9.
- At the start of each new unit of work teachers will gather information about student knowledge, skills and understanding in relation to that unit. This will be a baseline for that unit and will inform teacher judgements of how well they have progressed though that unit.