SCHOOL INSPECTOR GR
Good assessment means good responsive teaching, and we should use assessments that meet where stud By indicating student ability early on, baseline assessments may help to clarify and adjust expectations on an individual basis. Teachers can think of student potential as an iceberg—most of it hidden from view—and act upon the belief that high expectations and high-quality support will reveal what lies beneath.
A baseline assessment is not a high-stakes test with a focus on the ‘score’ at the end of it. Rather, it focuses on the student’s starting point and helps to strategically set goals and targets that will drive student motivation and future teaching and learning.
Take-aways for teachers Research shows that students need to be provided with many opportunities to set short-term, specific, and moderately difficult goals in their classroom work. Short-term goals are more motivating than long-term because it is easier to judge progress toward proximal goals.
A baseline assessment isn’t intended to measure everything a student knows and can do but a sample of that knowledge. A baseline assessment can give you the insight it isn’t possible to find out in any other way and then helps you to make better choices for your students.
here are many ways that schools can get an understanding of students’ starting points, including observation, quizzes, projects, essays, exams, formative assessment and so on. However, this can be time-consuming and while each teacher may have an understanding of the students in their class, it doesn’t give a consistent, comprehensive and whole school profile of student needs.
Using a good, standardised baseline assessment from an external provider that is founded on really robust research will help you understand students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes, and use the best possible data to set realistic and motivational targets and focus on progress.
Assessments such as InCAS (for students aged between 5 and 11) or (for students aged between 11 and 14) offer schools a valuable profile of baseline, predictive and value-added scores. That information helps schools to tailor their planning, teaching and learning, find the best ways to allocate resources and track students’ progress through school.
The increased use of a variety of assessments, as well as more sophisticated technology, has made more data available in schools than ever before, and the use of multiple data sources allows teachers to form a more comprehensive picture of the students’ understanding.
baseline assessments will show you how students performed on one test, on one day. They give you just a snapshot and should form just one diagnostic aspect of a school’s overall approach to assessment, alongside a whole range of formative and summative assessments and teacher observations and judgements.
Once you have discovered students’ current learning stage you can determine the amount of progress that students should make to help them reach where they want to be. Accurate data will help to set appropriate and challenging targets for a whole class, differentiated groups, or individual students.
A baseline assessment should complement the data you already have. It must be remembered that a single assessment can only provide some of the information which you need to build an approach for each student in your care. Skilled and careful triangulation of information from a range of sources will provide the best platform for success in the classroom.
These assessments were important to us as teachers because they were designed to be diagnostic, enabling the identification of strengths and weaknesses which could be used for planning learning experiences and interventions.
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SCHOOL BASELINE ASSESSMENT BHAUTIK