Assessment and Computing - A Practical Guide to Teaching Computing and ICT in the Secondary School - page 80

Self-assessment
Another way to help a learner to understand what they need to do to succeed is to
enable them to reflect on their own efforts when measured against specific criteria.
Learning diaries ( see later) which include reflections on 'What ideas in your friend's
work would you like to try to include in your own?' are helpful in developing the
capacity to self-assess.
Another idea would be to take advantage of the school's virtual learning
environment blogging facility, and encourage your pupils to blog about their
progress, perhaps once a week. Some learners may, at first, need help in structuring
their learning blog. To aid this, you could find examples of blogs on the Internet to
use as exemplars; for example, the Guardian Education site has some useful blogs …
but take care in what you choose.
RECORD KEEPING
Given the variety of evidence that can be used to form judgements of pupils'
progress, accurate recording is essential. Many different types of techniques can be
used to record evidence, including formal mark topics to collect data on summative
assessment, tick boxes and other systems for diagnostic assessment; for example
'Traffic lights'.
Trafic lights
Whilst doing practical work pupils may have access to a set of three coloured cards:
red, amber and green. If they are managing well they show the green card; if they
are absolutely unable to make progress they show the red; and if they are working
but could do with some help they show the amber. These can be set up as flags
located on top of the monitor. This system can also be used to collect feedback at
the end of the lesson, with the 'traffic lights' being included in a lesson review sheet
or the learning diary.
Of particular importance is the need to record 'soft' evidence; that is: evidence
that you may have obtained through observation or chance conversation; evidence
not easily generating a 'paper trail'. Videoing or photographs of pupils in the class
can work well, but is often time-consuming or inconvenient, and there are sensitive
issues related to this kind of activity which need to be taken into account. Often,
having a well-set-up mark book that enables the teacher to note when a student has
answered a question, demonstrated a skill or verbalised a concept is sufficient for
the majority of assessment purposes. It is also vital that the mark book is set up in
such a way as to enable the teacher to record student targets.
Examples of such a mark book format are given in Figure 4.4 (each row relates to
a specific learner, with names omitted to preserve confidentiality).