Most pupils now leave Year 6 with a range of scientific skills and knowledge that can help secondary teachers to make a quick start on work that is challenging and supports progression through two levels or the equivalent across a key stage.
Assessment, recording and reporting are important elements of teaching but they have to be manageable if the information they yield is to be useful. The best assessment has an immediate impact on both teaching and learning, enabling next steps to be identified and supported.
Regular assessment:
Setting appropriately challenging targets through the analysis of pupil performance data is a critical starting point in the target-setting process. The regular use of different types of assessment provides a good foundation with which to establish the curricular target-setting process for both teachers and pupils.
Schools can ensure that they set appropriately challenging targets by analysing pupils' performance against national benchmarks of both attainment and progress. RAISEonline provides a means by which this process of comparative analysis can be undertaken. It also enables predictions of outcomes to be made, based upon the results of previous cohorts of pupils.
Once numerical targets have been identified, they must be turned into curricular targets for individual groups of pupils, whole classes or individuals. These should then be used to inform teacher planning of learning objectives and learning outcomes in the long term (e.g. a term or year), medium term (e.g. a few weeks) or the short term (e.g. a few lessons).
Diagnostic analysis can identify the strengths and weaknesses in performance of individual pupils and groups and be used to inform lesson planning and the use of intervention programmes.
Curricular targets for individual pupils will usually be linked to the yearly learning objectives on which you will focus your teaching over the next few weeks, or to extracts from the appropriate level or grade descriptions.
A curricular target should be expressed in words, not numbers, and identify a specific aspect of the curriculum as a focus for development.
Curricular targets may be very specific and related to outcomes that are expected to be achieved, and should be linked to the yearly learning objectives for a particular group; for example, using the particle model to construct an explanation for simple chemical reactions.
Agreed targets need to be straightforward and limited in number at any one time; pupils need to understand the targets and be able to see how they can work to achieve them.
Pupils' progress should be tracked regularly and systematically through a whole-school system which involves all staff. Pupil tracking is essentially a cyclical process of data gathering and analysis which informs target setting, the reviewing of learning outcomes and the provision of quality first teaching and Wave 2 and Wave 3 intervention.
As pupils progress in science, their attainment often shows characteristics of several different levels, both within and across strands of the yearly learning objectives. A pupil's understanding rarely develops in a series of even learning steps, but often as quite sudden leaps interspersed with plateaux, and may even temporarily slip back before further progress is made.
The expectation is that increasing numbers of pupils make two levels of progress per key stage. A robust tracking system will ensure that pupils are on target and support intervention where this is not the case.
When subject departments are developing or refining the approaches they use to track pupils' progress, some useful guiding principles can be applied:
Pupils' progress can be monitored through:
