The future of assessment?

Will changes to assessment requirements in Primary and Secondary schools lead to changes in the way that assessment is delivered, reviewed and stored?

With assessment of writing at Key Stage 2 now being teacher based rather than via tests, there may be a need to rethink the way in which assessments are collated, monitored and reviewed. At Key Stage 3 there is also the need to collate evidence of pupil progress across the curriculum, resulting in potentially unwieldy piles of evidence that do little to track progress over the entire curriculum.

How can schools store assessments in a way that is useful for teachers and pupils alike?

As pupils can now be assessed against a wide variety of skills, processes and concepts that are cross curricular there is a need to manage assessment collation in a cross curricular manner. Use of an E-Portfolio system could come in very useful here. Pupils using an e-Portfolio can upload work from any subject area to their profile. They can be as creative or as traditional as they, or their teacher, wants them to be. Work can easily be tagged, in much the same way as a Blog post would be tagged, ensuring that work is easily ‘findable’ even months after it is uploaded.

Research in the United States shows that such a method can prove to be very effective.

Portfolios of the best kind include not only the documentation of teaching, but the documentation of student learning. In the ultimate nirvana, the very best teaching portfolios will consist predominantly of student portfolios. Shulman.

In these cases there is not only the collation of student work but the learning process and reflection on successes and failings is central to the assessment process. Self, peer and teacher feedback can easily be noted and reflected upon in a highly flexible manner.

Pupils are quite keen to work in this way, as these quotes from students making use of E-portfolio’s suggest:

I think that with the changing technology in the world it’s so much easier to view all of those things when you can just click where you want to be and where you want to go. The hard copies were so big and bulky to carry around and having to flip through and try to find things. I think e-portfolio is just easier access for us. A student from Kentucky, cited in recent US research.

I like having all my work in the EP. [Otherwise] all the paperwork is under my bed or wherever; with this I know it’s right on there always nice and neat. Any computer you go to you can access it, in the library or at home.

The most basic benefit is that you never lose anything. I’m prone to just have things falling out of my bag, and if I just do it, and right when I type it, before I even save it to a disk, I just upload it really quick, and then it’s there and I don’t have to think about it.

The video below outlines a number of ways in which e-Portfolio systems can be of benefit to schools.

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e-Portfolios

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