ASSESSMENT AND RECORDING

Introduction

The Scottish Office Education Department's guidelines Assessment 5-14 give schools advice on how to review and develop their assessment policies for all areas of the curriculum. The ways in which primary and secondary schools assess their pupils' progress in English language should be consistent with that general guidance. The present section deals specifically and briefly with methods of planning, conducting and recording assessment in language.

Basic points about assessing language

Assessment procedures in language should be planned as part of teaching and learning processes and should contribute positively to them. They should not determine what is taught and learned, but they may well offer information to allow the curriculum to be revised and methodologies to be rethought.

Assessment should help to build the confidence necessary to cope with increasing challenge. Pupils should be encouraged to develop from where they are, building on their language skills, rather than having the gap exposed between their present attainments and some ideal level of performance. They should be encouraged to overtake the attainment targets they are capable of through following the programmes of study. At the same time teachers should be alert to the need to challenge some pupils by stretching their abilities towards further targets which are within their reach.

In language, assessment should assist in building a positive relationship between teacher and pupil. This is not just a matter of sympathetic assistance in advancing the pupil's developing skills; it is also the gradual encouragement, through introducing peer- and self-assessment, for the pupil to become an independent learner. Peer and self-assessment techniques allow the teacher to share with pupils expectations and criteria for success and assessment, in a friendly and supportive way.

Planning assessment

The attainment targets for English language set out in Section 2 are designed to be a comprehensive set of learning goals for language. Since they indicate reasonable expectations of achievement for most pupils, they should be used by teachers as a framework for planning assessment. These targets do not, however, provide detailed assessment criteria for all the specific language tasks that pupils are likely to undertake. It is important therefore to note that within certain broad principles referred to later in this section, teachers retain scope and responsibility to choose forms and criteria for assessment that best fit their own programmes.

What forms is assessment likely to take? It is certainly not possible or desirable to assess ail of a class's activities in language all of the time. The information needed to inform decisions on assessment can be chosen satisfactorily from three sources: