Writing Assessment is Hard! How should we report assessments to parents?

Writing Network

Feb 14

What is the best way of reporting assessment information to students & parents? This is a question I hear all the time, and it isn’t easy to answer. What we all want is an assessment system that is (a) accurate, (b) easy to understand, (c) not too time-consuming for staff, and (d) motivating for students. But these principles are all in conflict with each other.

In Measuring Up, the assessment expert Daniel Koretz argues that the most accurate way of reporting assessment information is to tell students the fraction of a standard deviation they are from the mean.

But nobody wants to report that, because it cuts against all those other principles. We want to report information that students and parents will understand!

One system that seems really simple to understand is to put students into one of three categories. These three categories can have different names: emerging, expecting, exceeding. Below, at, above. Red, amber, green. Red, green, blue.

These systems have a surface clarity. People know what all these words mean in a way that they don’t know what a standard deviation is. But their surface clarity is often highly misleading, because even though you have put students into three categories, this doesn’t change the fact that their underlying performance is continuous. By putting them into three categories, you have just drawn lines on top of a continuous distribution, like so.

Here are some of the distortions this causes.

The categories are too big to be useful: Each category lumps together pupils with very different profiles, while those who are quite similar can get different grades. In the example above John and Paul are given the same label, even though John has more in common with George and Paul has more in common with Ringo.
Pupils at the bottom of the middle category get neglected. The pupils at the bottom of the middle grade will typically be in the bottom quintile of attainment, but they will be given a label that says ‘expected’. This is not what most people understand by expected. I can remember one school where a group of parents complained because their children had been getting the middle grade — ‘expected’ — for three years, but then were told when national exams started that their predicted grades were Es. As the E grade did correspond to about bottom quintile performance, the school were not necessarily inaccurate with either grade. But arguably the label was misleading. Not only that, but three part grading systems will often be used to define a group needing intervention, which means those students at the bottom of the middle category often miss out on interventions that could be useful.
It is not great at measuring progress. You can make enormous progress in this system and not have it recognised at all. You can also make trivial progress and it can result in you leaping up a grade. If you are in the top grade, you basically cannot make progress.

Are these distortions worth it for the simplicity? I would argue not.

I’d also argue that if we want to provide accurate and undistorted assessment information, we have to work through some complexity first in order to design a system that is clear and easy for students and parents to understand. My favourite quote on this issue is from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

At No More Marking, we use an assessment technique called Comparative Judgement to assess writing, and we aim to provide reports that are full of clear and useful information about student performance. We also provide results webinars where we explain exactly what our reports mean, and professional learning webinars where we explore key assessment principles. To find out more about how our assessments work, you can read more here or watch an introductory webinar here.

Daisy Christodoulou is Director of Education at No More Marking, a provider of online comparative judgement. She works closely with schools on developing new approaches to assessment. Before that, she was Head of Assessment at Ark Schools, a network of academy schools. She has taught English in two London comprehensives and has been part of government commissions on the future of teacher training and assessment.
Daisy is the author of Seven Myths about Education, Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning, and Teachers vs Tech. Her books will be available for sale at our event on March 3.

Don’t forget! Daisy is here in Australia!

A momentous Think Forward Educators event to super-charge your school's strategic planning for 2023.

This in-person event is suitable for Leadership teams, and primary & secondary teachers, across all subjects. It is a session on the overarching principles around assessment and writing, and how to make measurement meaningful.

A unique networking and professional learning opportunity with one of the UK's most sought-after education authors, Daisy Christodoulou, and Literacy Expert and TFE founder, Dr Nathaniel Swain. Sessions in this Breakfast Masterclass will include:
- Creating effective assessments
- Improving Writing
- Bullet-Proof Instruction for Writing Success