Designing the perfect assessment system, part 2

Is formative assessment the most important thing?

In my previous post, I listed four of the many different purposes of a national assessment system.

1. To give schools, universities and employers information about an individual student’s level of attainment and capacity for future study / employment (the summative function)

2. To give teachers, students & parents information about how the student can improve (the formative function)

3. To give the government and school improvement agencies information about which schools are doing well and are beacons of best practice, and which schools are struggling (the accountability function)

4. To give everyone information about whether educational standards are improving (the national standards function)

Whenever you show a list like this, many people will say that the most important aspect is formative assessment, because that’s what helps students improve. So surely a national assessment system should prioritise formative assessment over all else?

The problem with this argument is that good formative assessment is very specific - it aims to give students precise next steps on what they need to do next to improve. A national system that prioritised formative assessment would therefore also require a very specific national curriculum - far more so than the one we have at the moment. (As I have argued before, whilst England has a national curriculum it is not as important as you might think.)

What do I mean by "very specific"? I don’t just mean guidance on what novel or play to teach or what year you should introduce data handling. I mean guidance on what happens when you are teaching An Inspector Calls and students mix up Eric and Gerald, or what happens when students calculate the mean of a set of numbers and don’t include 0. This level of specific detail is what students need to improve and overcome misconceptions, but this level of specific detail is also very hard for central government to mandate.

Is it possible for a large country like England to direct learning at this level of detail? Even if it is possible, is it desirable? Would it be a good thing if the education minister could look at his or her watch and say "it's 11.30am on Tuesday October 1, therefore Year 8s are starting their first lesson on simultaneous equations"?

We are now into bigger questions about politics and state capacity, but they are not questions that can be avoided. In many different areas of the public sector, it can be difficult to implement very prescriptive top -down edicts. Government might be better off setting the rules of the game and building in incentives, and then leaving the practitioners to work out the best way of meeting them.

Applied to assessment, that would suggest government should not get involved with formative assessment, despite its importance. It should instead focus on the other purposes I mentioned: establishing reliable and consistent test scores that the public and students have confidence in, and constructing an accountability system that can reliably identify and reward good practice and provide support for struggling schools.

Still, it is worth pointing out that this is not the only possible approach, and there are historic examples of highly centralised and specific curriculums being extremely successful. Finland, for example, reformed its education system in the 1970s in an extremely prescriptive fashion, and it rose to the top on international tests. Here’s a quotation from Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World explaining how it worked.

In the 1970s, Finnish teachers had to keep diaries recording what they taught each hour. National school inspectors made regular visits to make sure teachers were following an exhaustive, seven-hundred-page centralized curriculum. Central authorities approved textbooks. Teachers could not be trusted to make their own decisions.

I don’t think an approach like this would work in England in 2024 for a number of reasons, one of which is the size of the system. England has a population of about 60 million, and about 20,000 schools, 4,000 of which are secondaries.

But plenty of jurisdictions are much smaller than this. Imagine one a tenth of the size, with just 400 secondary schools. It would be possible for all the heads of those schools to fit into a large auditorium, and for a small central team to have a personal relationship with them. This might make many types of reform easier - although it’s also possible it would increase the risks of groupthink too.

Whatever approach a government chooses, one thing it has to avoid is recommending an “adverb soup” approach to formative assessment, where teachers are given banks of statements like “Can use vocabulary creatively and originally” and encouraged to use them to provide students with formative feedback. I’ve called this the tyranny of the progression statement. It’s the worst of both worlds: prescriptive without being specific. This was a major problem with the English national curriculum of 2007 and remains a major problem in many other countries.

Ultimately, if a government is (quite understandably) not willing to implement a reform project like Finland’s of the 1970s, then it probably also has to content itself with focussing on summative aspects of assessment, and leaving the formative up to teachers and schools.