Marking (through assessment for learning) Policy

  Countess Anne School - A Church of England Academy

Living God’s Love through….

•  Academic provision that recognises the need for excellence in teaching and learning.
•  Holistic provision that encourages Christian hope; building spirit and soul through faith orientated pastoral care.
•  Inspirational provision through a modern curriculum that celebrates diversity and provides new opportunities.

Marking (through assessment for learning) Policy

Purpose:

The purpose of this policy is to help maintain culture of continuous improvement through effective marking. The policy will provide a consistent marking system throughout the Early Years Plus and Key Stages. The policy should be read alongside the document ‘Assessing pupils without levels & Reporting to parents’ which can be found on the school website.

Philosophy – Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Our school’s approach is that a pupil’s learning improves as it deepens in understanding and breadth of application. Progress is first achieved by using the skills of remembering and understanding. From here a pupil can begin to apply their understanding; it is this stage that we aim for all pupils to get to. However in a culture of continuous improvement we want to offer pupils opportunities to deepen their understanding by using the processes of analysis, creativity and evaluation. This movement from remembering to evaluation is called Bloom’s Taxonomy and is how the staff at Countess Anne decide on the next steps of learning for a child.

Aims:

• 1) To provide positive, constructive and continuous assessment that encourages pupils to recognize where they are along Bloom’s Taxonomy.
• 2) To help pupils, staff and parents identify next steps of learning.

Assessment for learning and marking strategies:

Using the language of learning:

• Encourage use of the word ‘learning’ rather than ‘work’; assessment for learning emphasizes sharing the learning process with pupils.
• Titles should reflect the learning objective* and marking should reflect the learning stage the pupils are at.
• Emphasize the process of learning - talk to children about their learning so that they in turn can articulate what stage they are at.

Make learning objectives clear:

• To emphasize the learning process use the phrase ‘We are learning to …’ which can be more open ended and avoids putting a ceiling on children’s learning.
• Develop clarity on whether the learning objective is ‘open’ or ‘closed’ – this will determine the type of success criteria used.
• Identify the learning skill and split it from the context (knowledge) – separating the learning objective from the context helps children to transfer and build on skills effectively.

Developing useful success criteria:

• Different types of success criteria are to be used – reflecting the essence of the learning objective and the stage at which the pupil is aiming for on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
• For example use Success Criteria relating to:

.. a sequence to follow

.. more open-ended learning

.. a process of learning

.. the acquisition of knowledge

and which reflect the skills of remembering, understanding, application, analysis, creativity or evaluation.

Assessment tasks:

• Assessment tasks should be presented in the assessment colours of yellow, green or blue to help both pupil and staff easily recognize at what stage their learning is at and how it is being moved on:

Yellow: Remembering and Understanding

Green: Application

Blue: Analysis, Creativity or Evaluation

• Staff should ensure that the success criteria are accessible – it is important to have success criteria written and easily visible, so that children can use them for both peer and self-reference. Success criteria are most effective if they can be used several times, therefore it is important to make sure that children have easy access to them.

Peer and Self-Assessment:

• Means that staff should provide time for pupils to identify where and how they could make something better, and then to make the improvement on that piece of work.
• Make sure that pupils understand the success criteria for reflecting on the process of learning or for judging the outcome of a piece of work.
• Teach children the Bloom’s Taxonomy language that they will need in order to talk to each other about their learning. ‘Learning Partners’ should be used both systematically and explicitly. The skills of questioning, clarifying, summarizing and predicting need to be taught.
• As pupils progress the class teacher should record their progress on the school’s O-track system. This is done by indicating the Bloom’s Taxonomy stage the pupil has reached in that learning objective.
• In the foundation subjects pupils should keep a track of how they are progressing via an overview at the front of their exercise/sketch books which shows the assessment progress that they are making against a key concept. Pupils should colour these in using yellow, green or blue depending on the stage that they are at and be able to talk about what they need to do to get to the next stage.

Using written and verbal feedback:

Children will receive feedback on all work and when written this should be done in green pen except in sketch books where pencil should be used:

• Teachers are expected to identify appropriate corrections © and spellings (sp) in all subjects, and when necessary challenge presentation (p). The number of errors to be corrected should provide a useful learning opportunity, one that reflects the learning capability of the child and the lesson time available.
• Written comments should focus on affirming what stage the pupil is at in their learning, relating to the learning objective rather than the activity, e.g. ‘Well done you have remembered the features of a non-chronological report’, ‘Excellent you have shown that you understand the difference between a fact and opinion’ or ‘Your analysis between these two characters is first class; well done’. On occasion detail an improvement a pupil could make, e.g. re-write a sentence, use a more powerful word, solve a problem in less steps or simply re-write to improve presentation. Pupils should respond to these in pink pen.
• The next lesson and planned review of ‘success criteria’ should be designed to take into account the next steps of a pupil’s learning. Teachers will direct pupils to frequent formative assessment tasks to determine where a pupil is within Bloom’s Taxonomy. These assessment tasks should be presented in the colours of yellow, green or blue to ensure that a pupil knows which skill they are aiming to achieve.
• If continued errors demonstrate a lack of understanding preventing a pupil or group of children from progressing onto the next step the teacher may decide to take an alternative course of action beyond that of providing written or verbal feedback. For instance, with a small number of pupils the teacher may arrange same – day intervention, additional homework, next day sole allocation to the teacher for revisiting the learning.
• Verbal feedback as work progresses will be noted using a Vb in the margin. What is important is that the work which follows the Vb should demonstrate an improvement; this is how the impact of the Vb is measured.
• Teachers should use the learning language of Bloom’s Taxonomy to help denote at which assessment point a pupil is at:

Remembering and Understanding = Developing

Application = Secure

Analysis, Creativity and Evaluation = Mastery

Teachers are expected to use their professional judgment as to when a pupil should move from one assessment point to the next.

The above policy will be annually reviewed.