Digital Portfolios - Formative Assessment

Defining Assessment

Assessment is the process of generating, gathering, recording, interpreting, using and reporting evidence of learning in individuals, groups or systems. Educational assessment provides information about progress in learning, and achievement in developing skills, knowledge, behaviours and attitudes.

(NCCA, 2007: P7)

Assessment in Primary Schools

Assessment in the Primary School Curriculum: Guidelines for Schools (2007) describes a variety of assessment methods for gathering information about children’s learning and assists schools in developing and implementing an assessment policy.

Assessment is integral to all aspects of teaching and learning. It concerns daily interactions between teacher and child that include moment-by-moment conversations, observations and actions. By using a combination of methods over time, the teacher gathers evidence of children’s progress and achievement. Based on this evidence, he/she can make important decisions about the teaching and learning process and plan how future learning can be supported most effectively.

What is Formative Assessment?

Formative Assessment is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.

(Assessment Reform Group, 2002: P2-3)

The concept of assessment for learning (AfL) extends the potential of formative assessment. It emphasises the pupil’s active role in his/her own learning, in that the teacher and child agree what the outcomes of the learning should be and the criteria for judging to what extent the outcomes have been achieved.

Formative Assessment helps teachers and children to focus on three key questions:

Where are pupils now in their learning?
Where are pupils going in their learning?
How will children get to the next point in their learning?

Formative Assessment does not generally happen at the end of a particular piece of work or a period of time. It usually takes place in the day-to-day minute-by-minute interactions between teachers and children.

(NCCA, 2007: P9)

Effective Formative Feedback

"Nothing that we do to, or for, our students is more important than our assessment of their work and the feedback we give them on it.”

(Race, Brown and Smith 2005)

Providing effective formative feedback is central to formative assessment and the use of digital portfolios has the potential to make it more efficient for teachers to provide feedback and for pupils to respond to it.

This feedback is based on evidence of how and what the pupils are learning. Feedback focused on the learning or task in hand, can help pupils identify and celebrate their progress and achievements, pinpoint challenges they experience, and decide what the next steps should be. This level of involvement in shaping their own learning can heighten pupils’s awareness of themselves as learners and encourage them to take more personal responsibility for, and pride in, their learning.

(NCCA, 2007: P9)

Portfolio Assessment

A portfolio is a collection of the child’s work, reflecting his/her learning and development over a period of time. It can provide evidence of progress in learning in a curriculum area, a subject, a strand, or across a number of these, using a topic or theme as the focus.

(NCCA, 2007: P30)

The NCCA states that assessment takes many different forms and can be used in a variety of ways. This is reflected in their continuum of assessment which suggests a range of assessment approaches that teachers may wish to use in their classrooms. Eight assessment methods are outlined along a Continuum which is presented on page 13 of Assessment in the Primary School Curriculum: Guidelines for schools (2007). The methods range from observation and questioning as part of daily teaching and learning, to more formal and structured teacher designed tests, standardised tests, portfolios and student self assessment.

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