Assessment for Learning and Ideas about Science
Help students develop their understanding
Assessment for learning can help students to develop their understanding of ideas about science.
Resources to help students learn
Look out for assessment for learning material on this website. We shall be producing Key Assessed Tasks for each GCSE Science module. The first of these will be published on this website is now available, to be completed by Easter 2009.
>>NEW! Download the first activities, with a table of ideas about science specification statements in student-speak
Assessment for learning ideas about science 2008 (231 KB)
Relationship between teaching and assessment of Ideas about Science
There is general agreement that Ideas about Science are important. But there is much less certainty about how students’ understanding might be assessed, and much less experience of doing so.
As in all aspects of science learning, assessment is crucially important because it makes teaching and learning objectives clearer than anything else does. This is not simply the observation that ‘teachers teach to the test’. It is the deeper point that any statement about learning objectives has to be operationalised in order to pin it down. We have to say what observable action by the student, perhaps in response to a task we set them, will count as evidence that they have achieved the learning we want them to achieve.
So developing ways of assessing students’ learning is not something that can simply be done after the learning objectives have been settled; it is an essential part of the process of clarifying (both for ourselves and others) what our real learning objectives are. In GCSE Science, the Twenty First Century Science project team began this step of operationalising the learning outcomes for ‘Ideas about Science’. These learning outcomes are shown in Appendix F of the specification – see the right-hand column of the tables. They say what a student might do to provide evidence of understanding the idea in question.
Link to:
Distinguishing between ‘Ideas about Science’ and ‘Skills’ in assessment
