Assessments

Formative Assessment

Every lesson includes formative assessment opportunities for teachers to use. These opportunities are listed in the lesson plan and are included to ensure that misconceptions are recognised and addressed if they occur. They vary from teacher observation or questioning, to marked activities.

These assessments are vital to ensure that teachers are adapting their teaching to suit the needs of the pupils that they are working with, and you are encouraged to change parts of the lesson, such as how much time you spend on a specific activity, in response to these assessments.

The learning objective and success criteria are introduced in the slides at the beginning of every lesson. At the end of every lesson, pupils are invited to assess how well they feel they have met the learning objective using thumbs up, thumbs sideways, or thumbs down. This gives pupils a reminder of the content that has been covered, as well as a chance to reflect. It is also a chance for teachers to see how confident the class is feeling so that they can make changes to subsequent lessons accordingly.

Teachers, after each lesson, will then add their assessments on to our school assessment tracker ‘Insight’ to gain an overall picture of the child’s learning and this will then feed into the summative assessments.

Summative Assessment 

Every unit includes a summative assessment in the form of either a multiple-choice quiz (MCQ) or a rubric. All units are designed to cover both skills and concepts from across the computing national curriculum. Units that focus more on conceptual development include an MCQ. Units that focus more on skills development end with a project and include a rubric. However, within the ‘Programming’ units, the assessment framework (MCQ or rubric) has been selected on a best-fit basis.

Teachers will then use the formative assessment to give an overall termly assessment for each child to say whether they are working below, towards, expected or greater depth for the end of year expectations. These are tracked on ‘Insight’ for class teachers, subject co-ordinator, team leaders and SLT to use to inform planning and moving forward. 

Multiple Choice Quiz (MCQ)

Each of the MCQ questions has been carefully chosen to represent learning that should have been achieved within the unit. In writing the MCQs, we have followed the diagnostic assessment approach to ensure that the assessment of the unit is useful to determine both how well pupils have understood the content, and what pupils have misunderstood, if they have not achieved as expected. Each MCQ includes an answer sheet that highlights the misconceptions that pupils may have if they have chosen a wrong answer. This ensures that teachers know which areas to return to in later units.

Rubric

The rubric is a tool to help teachers assess project-based work. Each rubric covers the application of skills that have been directly taught across the unit, and highlights to teachers whether the pupil is approaching (emerging), achieving (expected), or exceeding the expectations for their age group. It allows teachers to assess projects that pupils have created, focussing on the appropriate application of computing skills and concepts. Pedagogically, we want to ensure that we are assessing pupils’ understanding of computing concepts and skills, as opposed to their reading and writing skills. This has been carefully considered both in how MCQs have been written (considerations such as the language used, the cultural experiences referenced, etc) and in the skills expected to be demonstrated in the rubric.