It's electrifying!

Today's lecture was all about assessment, through the medium of electricity.

We had a recap about scientific skills. I wasn't 100% sure what a 'science question' included. What is key is that it is what comes from the children, not the teacher. It is a question that you can investigate and there is a difference between a science question and a question about science. Clear? Yup - thought so!

We looked at the difference between summative and formative assessment:

Summative - data about a particular moment in time and doesn't affect the pupil's learning.

Formative - All. The. Time. Feedback to the children in order to improve their learning.

For much of the assessment examples, they could actually be regarded as both! For example if you did an end of unit test and then went through the test next lesson, then it is both. Equally, if you had the children doing some talk, pair, share and wrote down what they said, it would be both as well!

Key to assessment however is LEARNING OUTCOMES. There cannot be any discussion, useful activities, feedback, etc if the children don't know what they are there to learn!

It is also central that we find out what PRIOR KNOWLEDGE the children have. Children bring in loads of prior knowledge into lessons and end of unit tests shows us more of what they already knew, rather than their new learning!

A great online resource is PLANassessment where there is lots of examples of planning and what children of each yr group should be attaining.

The best way to assess? QUESTIONING! Making sure that they are open & person-centred.

We looked at Concept cartoons as a gentle way of introducing a topic and maybe to assess at the end. They normally have a few speech bubbles to highlight misconceptions.

Subject Knowledge

1. Current - the flow of charge

2. Voltage - the 'push'

3. Resistance - how many components get in the way

Looked at a great online resource to make circuits (in case the equipment doesn't work!)

BUT - just because a pupil is awesome in the lesson (like me?!). It doesn't mean they will retain that information (like me?). We need to recall it again and again in order to get it to go into our LT memory.

A great lesson. After seeing the result of my audit, however, I am slightly frightened at how much subject knowledge I am missing in science. I need to go through the audit and create an action plan, just like the one I have done for maths.