SPBEA has for many years been endeavouring to use assessment as an additional tool for use by students and teachers in their effort to secure demonstrable levels of learning. In the early years the emphasis lay on the inclusion of assessment methods that fell outside the conventional examination format, thereby allowing a range of skills to be assessed that would otherwise be overlooked. This was then married with an emphasis on formative assessment programmes within the classroom, designed to ensure that structured feedback to students resulted in improved levels of understanding.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the ways that SPBEA is currently attempting to combine three separate but related assessment approaches. The monitoring of national literacy and numeracy standards; the establishment of paths towards achievement by providing teachers with sets of well defined learning outcomes; and monitoring changes in strategy adopted by teachers, each contributing towards the goal of realizing improvement in the quality of teaching and learning.
An SPBEA led initiative for the coming year is centred on the monitoring of teachers in order to determine the degree to which their teaching strategies have been changed by shifting the focus onto learning outcomes and the pathway described by defined achievement levels. It is intended that a system of self-appraisal is made by the teacher, with comparison appraisal made by a professional colleague.