Assessment for Learning to Facilitate Inquiry-

Based Learning
Module Two – Effective Assessment for Learning

Introduction

In this second module, we will explore how teachers can apply Assessment for Learning practices to their own
teaching, including when planning lessons and setting success criteria. We will also look at various strategies that
teachers can use to monitor progress.

Lesson planning

What questions should you ask yourself when planning a lesson?

Before you plan your lesson, you will need to think about the following points:

• What knowledge, skills or understanding are the key focus of the inquiry?
• What prior knowledge or ability do students have?
• What do students need to know, be able to do, or understand to move forward in their inquiry?
• What learning experiences and resources will support them to move forward?
• How will you know students are making progress?
• How will you co-construct rubrics or success criteria with students to allow them to own the assessment
process?
• What questions will you ask to support and extend students’ thinking?

You should plan for ongoing formative assessment strategies that you will use throughout an inquiry.

To facilitate the answers to these questions and to guide students’ learning, you will need to develop the assessment
for learning strategies that you will use.

Assessment for learning strategies

What Assessment for Learning (AfL) strategies have you used or seen used by other teachers?

Pre-assessment

Activities at the start of a unit can be used to help teachers understand what students already know. It can also help
them highlight students’ interests, for example, a student who generally finds science challenging may have an
interest in space and know lots about it.

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representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

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Circulating

As students are working on tasks in groups, teachers can move around the class and have conversations with them.
It also allows teachers to uncover misconceptions in students’ work or in their group conversations and address
these straight away.

Quizzes and games

These are enjoyable and fun for students and can give immediate feedback as the teacher can see students’
understanding and can address any points that students are struggling with.

Peer-assessment

Students can work together to create success criteria and can use these to give peer feedback as the work
progresses and at the end of a unit.

Observations

Teachers can set up provocations and activities in the learning environment which give them opportunities to sit and
watch what is happening and make a note of how students are progressing.

Rubrics

Rubrics clearly indicate the achievement criteria for both the teacher and the student to see what they need to do to
progress, making them a valuable tool for feedback after a unit or piece of work.

Learning intentions and success criteria

Professor John Hattie is a researcher in education. He has been Professor of Education and Director of the
Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011.
His research includes performance indicators, models of measurement, and evaluation of teaching and learning.
John Hattie became known to a wider public with his two books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers.

Watch the video Learning Intentions and Success Criteria. As you watch the video, consider:

What is the purpose of success criteria and learning intentions and how do they impact learning?

The main purpose of success criteria and learning intentions is to clearly show students what they are learning and
to allow students to know what success looks like before they begin.

They also encourage teachers to find out what students know and do not know first, so that they work out what
success will be for these students.

Self-assessment

Why do you think self-assessment is important for students?

Alongside teacher assessment, an essential element of AfL is students’ self-assessment.

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aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
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For this to be effective, it needs to be an integral part of your teaching practice that is woven into your lessons
regularly so that students value it as a key indicator of their progress.

Student self-assessment may take different forms.

• The teacher shares success criteria with students at the beginning of the lesson to be used as a benchmark
for their progress during the lesson.
• Students assess a model answer against the success criteria.
• Students assess themselves against the success criteria at points in the lesson.
• At the end of the lesson, students reflect on their own learning and set themselves relevant targets for
progress.
• Integrating peer assessment, students can assess each other’s work using success criteria or develop their
own success or assessment criteria.

One of the most effective tools in the AfL toolkit is to use students as the teacher. Students teach a topic to their
peers, either individually to a group, or to each other in pairs.

This broadens and deepens understanding for the students being taught and the student teaching, especially if the
students as teachers are questioned about how they have taught a topic or skill.

Progress signifiers

How do teachers assess students’ learning in the classroom? What strategies do you currently use to check on
students’ understanding and progress?

There are many different strategies that teachers can use to monitor students’ understanding and progress.

Teachers may find that certain strategies work better for them and their students depending on factors such as:

• age of students
• subject being taught
• nature of the lesson.

Entry slips

Ask students to take a ‘ticket’ on their way into the classroom. On the slip of paper should be between one and three
simple questions so that students can quickly show their understanding of learning from previous lessons.

Review questions

Ask some simple review questions to the class to quickly gauge the extent to which students have retained or
grasped prior learning.

Review activity

Give a short ‘warm up’ task that is a review of prior learning. This could be a short quiz or a true or false game. Again,
it should allow you to quickly assess if students have grasped and retained prior learning.

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aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing by Tes Global Ltd.
Observations

You can often tell whether a student is making good progress or struggling with the work by simply looking at their
body language. Students who look annoyed or stressed, who appear to be hiding their work or looking around the
room helplessly, are often the students who need some support to move forward in their learning.

However, although the students exerting more confidence may feel that they are mastering their work, it is also
worth checking to ensure these students are on the right track.

Traffic lights

Giving students a red, yellow and green sign or cup and asking them to present a colour to show how they feel about
a task during the lesson allows the students to signal if they are finding tasks easy or difficult in a subtle way.

Students should show green if they understand the work, yellow if they understand but are finding it a bit difficult,
and red if they either do not understand what to do or cannot do it. The teacher should regularly observe the
students’ traffic lights, and support and extend students appropriately.

Traffic lights can also be used as a self-assessment tool at the end of a piece of work to show their understanding of
lesson content or the extent to which they think they met the learning intention.

Whiteboards

Asking a question and asking the students to quickly write down their answer on a whiteboard and show it to you is
an effective way for teachers to see all students’ thinking, rather than only being able to ask one student at a time
for an answer.

Using this method, the teacher can quickly observe the answers of all students and assess the level to which the
class understands the concept, as well as identifying students who keep getting the answers correct or incorrect and
therefore require extension or support.

Thumbs up or down

Thumbs up show that students understand a concept and are confident about what they need to do. Thumbs in the
middle show that students think they know but are a little unsure or unconfident. Thumbs down signals that a
student is very unconfident or unsure about what they need to do.

This strategy is effectively used before sending students off to start a task, to check their understanding of what they
need to do, and identify students who require additional support or instruction before starting the task. It is also an
effective self-assessment strategy to use at the end of a lesson.

Questioning

The teacher should use questions to elicit understanding from the student and use this to decide what the student
needs to progress further. The questioning could be verbal or written.

Circulating the classroom

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aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing by Tes Global Ltd.
Throughout a lesson, teachers should be regularly circulating the classroom. Although a teacher may work to
support or extend a certain group of students, this should be only for a five or ten-minute period, before the teacher
again circulates the class to continue monitoring students’ progress.

Mini-plenaries

Mini-plenaries are a chance for teachers to stop and check in on students’ understanding or tackle common
misconceptions that the teacher has noticed through observation and circulating the classroom. In a mini-plenary,
the teacher should bring the class back together for a quick ‘check-in’ quiz or question session, or for explicit
teaching linked to a misconception that has arisen.

If during any of these activities, prior to or during learning, you realise there is a gap in knowledge, understanding or
skills, take the time to review and re-teach these concepts before continuing to progress with learning.
Make a sensible judgement on whether reviewing and re-teaching is needed by the whole class or just a small group
of students.

If assessment at the end of the lesson shows that students did not grasp the knowledge, skills or understanding of
concepts in the lesson, use this to inform your planning.

Write down the names of students who struggled and need more support and those that quickly grasped the lesson
content and need further extension. Use this to effectively adapt the next lesson’s learning to meet the different
needs of the students.

Effective questioning

Consider the following questions and write your thoughts.

Effective questioning is essential for effective AfL. It is one of the keys to developing students’ understanding and
showing progression of thinking in your lesson. As teachers, we should plan our questions to ensure that they enable
our students to deepen their understanding and scaffold
their progress.

Older students should also be taught to use questioning as a tool to assess their understanding and then
independently develop their own paths of progress.

Watch the video of teachers discussing the value of questioning in their inquiry practice.

Questioning is important to develop an interactive style of communication, and to develop students’ communication
skills. One of the first stages of questioning is getting students to talk, and to have the confidence to share their
thoughts and ideas with the class.

How can teachers tailor questions for different purposes?

Whilst Tes Global Ltd have made every effort to ensure that the courses and their content have been devised and written by leading experts who have ensured that they reflect best practice in all
aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing by Tes Global Ltd.
Types of questions

Questions can be categorised in many ways. Understanding some of the key question types can help to you
effectively tailor questions to your students to get the level of thinking and response that you are after. Click on the
icons.

Factual questions

Factual questions have only one correct answer, such as, "What did you have for breakfast this morning?"

The answer is not always simple, however; it depends on how broad the question is. These target lower order
thinking.

Interpretive questions

Interpretive questions have more than one answer, but they still must be supported with evidence.
For example, depending on their interpretations, people can have different, equally valid answers to the question,
"Why did Ahab chase Moby Dick?".

The answers are not wrong unless they have no relationship to the text at all.

Evaluative questions

Evaluative questions ask for an opinion, belief or point of view, so they have no wrong answers. Nonetheless, the
answers do depend on prior knowledge and experience, so they are good ways to lead discussions and explore
books or other artistic works.

They rarely make for good inquiry-based projects because they are internally focused, but they can be a great way to
connect with and elicit interaction from young or shy students. These target higher order thinking.

Which of the question types match the following questions?

Which style of art do you prefer out of the three in front of you, and why? – evaluative
Where did the Olympic games originate? - factual
Why did the character choose to act in that way? - interpretive

In which situations would it be best to use factual questions?

When teachers pose a question to students, they do not know what students are going to say as a response, and so
must have the confidence to deal with any answer.

It is important to be prepared with thorough subject knowledge and to expect that quite often students will ask a
range of questions to gain more information about the lesson topic.

Watch the videos to see how questioning is used in an inquiry-based classroom.

In the second video, effective strategies to help you and your students to assess progress in learning are discussed.
Although there are many references throughout this video to these practices being used in Project-Based Learning

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aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing by Tes Global Ltd.
(PBL), the approach of PBL and inquiry is very similar and so the examples, information, and strategies shared will be
very relevant to your inquiry classroom.

Summary

This concludes your course on ‘Assessment for Learning to Facilitate Inquiry-Based Learning’, in which you have
learned about the different forms of assessment, the purposes and benefits of assessment, and how AfL strategies
can be used in the classroom to support students’ learning and the teacher’s understanding of their students.

You are now ready to complete the questionnaire. Click Questionnaire 2 to undertake the questions.

When you have completed the questionnaire, there is the opportunity for you to leave feedback on the course and
we would be very grateful if you would take a minute to do so.

Whilst Tes Global Ltd have made every effort to ensure that the courses and their content have been devised and written by leading experts who have ensured that they reflect best practice in all
aspects, Tes Global Ltd exclude their liability of the consequences of any errors, omission or incorrect statements to the fullest extent permitted by law and Tes Global Ltd make no warranty or
representation as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of any statements or other content in the course.

No part of this material may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system
without permission in writing by Tes Global Ltd.