Assessment with Craig’n’Dave resources

Summative assessment

Homework

Students copy or write notes into an exercise book using the Cornell method of note-taking. We acknowledge they have done the work by indicating whether it has been completed, partially completed, not completed or completed to a high standard. We do not provide any written feedback for this work as it is really intended for students to use to help them complete classwork.

When students are working in class, there is usually an opportunity as part of your interaction with students to look at their exercise book and talk to them about the quality of their notes. Encourage them to start a new page for each video to make this easier. If you fall behind, take a lesson to call each student to your desk and look at a number of pages at once.

GCSE workbooks

Each of our GCSE workbooks has a set of minimum expectations. These are to learn the key terms from the topic, complete all pages of the workbook and score 80% in the end of unit test.

When students have completed a topic workbook we mark their work on a four-point scale under three categories: breadth, depth and understanding. Written feedback is given on each slide where appropriate with a summary comment and action to be taken by the student on the assessment page.

The unit test includes questions totalling 20 marks to enable comparisons between tests to be made. It also allows the test to be completed in just 20 minutes in a lesson. Students that score less than 16 marks are required to resit the same test again until they hit the pass mark of 80%. It is not necessary to set different questions, you want the students to know the answers to the questions they were set! This approach helps with mastery.

A level activities and structured learning records

Our A level resources include bite-sized class activities and a structured learning record (SLR) for each topic. We do not mark the class activities because these are simply used to give students “assets” to include in their SLR.

Each SLR is marked on a four-point scale under four categories: breadth, depth, presentation and understanding. Unlike GCSE, an SLR is not pre-populated for the student and therefore the presentation of their work is also important. SLRs also contain minimum expectations. We expect students to include all the key terminology from a topic and format these key words in a way to make them stand out. This aids both revision and marking.

Programming

We assess programming tasks with an oral feedback framework. It is much more effective to have rich conversations with students about the programming tasks they have undertaken than writing a few comments about them. Ask students about:

1. Program comprehension: to what extent does the student understand the code they have written? Ask students about lines of code they have written and ask them to explain how their algorithm works.
2. Maintainability: to what extent and how consistently have best practices been used to create readable code. I.e. the use of comments, subroutines, sensible identifier names and whitespace. Have counter controlled loops been used appropriately?
3. Scalability: to what extent could subroutines be used in future programs? What would happen if the data set increased significantly? Have arrays, indexes and iterations been used appropriately?
4. Robustness: to what extent can the program handle erroneous data input? This is a more advanced topic to stretch the more able students to write portable data validation routines.
5. Approach: to what extent is the code the best algorithm for solving the problem? Could the code be more efficient by minimising the use of data storage, CPU cycles or programmer expertise? If there are other viable alternatives discuss these with the student and ask them to justify their approaches.

Formative assessment

In addition to summative assessment practices, we use Smart Revise to identify misconceptions and concepts not well understood. The reports in Smart Revise allow a teacher to easily identify the top 10 least understood aspects of the course, how comfortable students are with the subject terminology and how well students are likely to perform in examinations.

Student-teacher interactions

A critical component of our approach is to spend as little time at the front of the classroom explaining concepts and as much time as possible with individual students and small groups. By using resources that encourage and enable independence from the teacher, it enables you to ask questions of individual students while the rest of the class are working. This is not only great differentiation and personalised learning, but it is also a great opportunity for formative assessment too.

Videos