Why you need to assess

Because you have to.

QCA, Ofsted and other agencies are promoting the need for skills, competencies, dispositions to be taught and assessed explicitly in schools.

In Ofsted’s annual report for 2006-07, Christine Gilbert, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector states that:

We need to improve the level and transferability of the UK's skill base... and create a learning culture in which the vocational and the academic are valued equally highly.

She then poses the question:

How effectively are skills taught, in the classroom? Too often teachers ignore opportunities to emphasise the value of work-related skills such as communication, problem-solving, team-building skills and creativity. Equally important - perhaps even more so - is the attention given to other key social and personal skills of the workplace: punctuality, teamwork and the ability to communicate clearly and confidently.

This will be inspected in the new Ofsted inspections. Gilbert states that inspectors will report on “how well learners develop workplace and other skills that will contribute to their future economic well-being.” Ofsted will also be interviewing students with a view to ascertain how they are being encouraged to work independently and develop as learners.

In their report, A focus on improvement: proposals for maintained school inspections from September 2009, Ofsted state that they wish to “judge the well-being of learners’ social and cultural development”. They say “Inspectors will ask students what they know and can do, how well they have mastered skills and judge whether they are becoming independent learners.”

In the report, Indicators of a School’s contribution to well-being, Ofsted state that:

Schools have a crucial role to play in promoting the well-being of children and young people. Their central mission is to promote their pupils’ achievement and to help them to realise their potential as learners. But their role is wider than this: schools are concerned with the development of the whole child and young person, recognising, for example that pupils’ self confidence, social skills and resilience not only contribute to their achievement but are important in their own right.

QCA are asking that schools develop students’ “attitudes and attributes, e.g. determined, adaptable, risk taking, confident, enterprising”. That we develop students’ “personal, learning and thinking skills”, we give them opportunities for “spiritual, moral, social, cultural, emotional, intellectual and physical development” and that we “personalise assessment” and look at the “whole child” and “evaluate the impact” looking at their “progress in skills”, setting “clear goals for improvement”.

Because you want to

Today's 21st Century or 'new' learning skills are making demands for 'new' assessments. QCA has identified some of the skills involved as team working, independent enquiry, self-management, reflective learning, effective participation and creative thinking. All of these are covered through YesAssessments.

Baker (2007) has also argued the need to assess "...adaptive problem-solving, risk assessment, managing distraction, self-management and changeable roles".

Because your students need you to.

Could do better? Now your students can.

A YesAssessment increases focus on Social and Emotional Learning:

We want schools to teach children to be literate, numerate and to think critically but also to focus on the ‘education of the whole child’. This implies an increasing focus on social and emotional learning. The challenge is to encourage social and emotional aspects of learning within the curriculum without jeopardising recent gains in academic attainment.
The Good Childhood Report, The Children's Society, 2009

By valuing students' social and emotional aspects of learning, by being explicit about it, and by enabling students to develop through assessment you can help the 'education of the whole child'. This is what we mean by 'positive assessment'. A YesAssessment is a Positive Assessment.