Strengthening teachers' summative assessments

This project aimed to investigate how to help teachers enhance the validity and reliability of their assessments in order to ensure they play a significant and trustworthy part in all summative assessments of their students.

Increased public and professional dissatisfaction with the current regime of national testing, in particular the suggestion that it is detrimental to pupil's learning, has led to changes in Scotland and Wales where national assessments up to age 14 have been replaced with a system of teacher assessment. Rigorous research, which develops understanding of the efficacy and methodology of teacher assessment, is limited.

This project was designed to address this by developing methods and processes for ensuring the comparability of judgements, and to disseminate the findings to a variety of audiences. It was a collaboration between King's College London and Oxfordshire LEA, which extended another capacity-building pilot study. The research was set in the context of English and Mathematics at Year 8.