Module 3: Assessment for quality learning - Science

Unit 9: Strategies for developing learner-centred assessment practices

Assessing students’ achievements and progress in their studies has taken on a significant focus in recent years so that much more emphasis is given to the role of assessment as an ongoing part of the daily teaching and learning process. This Unit asks you to audit your current assessment practices and provides insight into different ways of finding out what your students know and understand at different stages of a topic. This will enable you to plan more effective and targeted lessons. The Unit also discusses the importance of giving feedback to students about their achievements.

Units 10–11: Questioning techniques to promote formative assessment practice for student learning (double unit)

This Unit is a double Unit because questioning is such an important part of the teaching and learning cycle. How and when a teacher uses questioning and what kinds of questions they use can have a dramatic impact on a lesson and successful learning outcomes for students. Too many teachers ask mainly closed questions where a student has to just give a short, factual answer. This Unit explores how, by asking more open-ended questions, a teacher can help students to think more deeply and become more interested in a range of topics. Students can also be encouraged to ask their own questions about a topic, which they can then try to answer through investigation. Such approaches stimulate much more participation and success in learning.

Unit 12: Recording progress in learning

It is important that you, as a Science teacher, keep records of your students’ progress that you can use to plan the next steps of their learning. This Unit shows how a list of test marks will tell you little, but how annotated samples of students’ work or test marks with comments can give you a much better picture of their progress and thus enable you to plan more effective next steps. Keeping a range of records will allow you to identify more clearly which students need extra support and what kind of support they need.

This Unit also explores how important it is that you have clear learning outcomes for
each lesson and are clear about what evidence you need to be sure that a student
knows and understands what you have taught them.