Teacher Assessment

What is teacher assessment?

The term 'teacher assessment' is most frequently used to refer to a type of assessment that is less formalised than coursework assessment. The term implies that teachers carry out teacher assessment in the course of their normal teaching activities, rather than as a separate activity. The work assessed through teacher assessment is typically normal classwork, ongoing work, often including practical work and work producing ephemeral evidence, rather than an end-product in the form of an assignment or artefact. Teacher assessment may not be externally moderated at all, but where moderation occurs, it is generally 'lighter touch' and therefore less intrusive than the usual external coursework assessment moderation.

How is teacher assessment used?

The outcomes of teacher assessment may or may not contribute directly to a candidate's marks or grade in a qualification. In some cases teacher assessment may be used to inform judgements in coursework assessment without actually contributing to the marking. In other cases eg GCSE pilot specifications in Geography and History, certain components of the specification are teacher-assessed, with the marks for those components contributing directly to candidates' overall final grades.

What are the advantages of teacher assessment?

It is argued that teacher assessment can be deemed more valid than certain other forms of assessment because it assesses what students are doing as a normal part of following a course of teaching, rather than requiring them to carry out separate, artificially constructed activities. Teacher assessment is seen as a means of reducing the burden of assessment on students, since it does not require them to carry out any extra activities, and also on teachers, since it requires them to do no more marking than they would normally do in the course of delivering a teaching programme. The use of teacher assessment may also reduce the demands on awarding bodies to recruit, train and deploy moderators.

What are the disadvantages of teacher assessment?

One of the risks of teacher assessment is that students may feel that they are being assessed all the time, leading to a feeling of constant pressure, thus increasing rather than decreasing the burden of assessment. Similarly teachers may feel that they have to be assessing continuously, keeping records of everything a student says or does. There is a danger that this will interfere with normal teaching and learning. A further disadvantage of teacher assessment is that it may be perceived as less rigorous and reliable than normal coursework assessment and external assessment because of the absence of moderation or the use of a 'lighter touch' approach to moderation, that can be perceived as allowing teachers a free hand in the awarding of marks to their students.

Moderation of teacher assessment

Where external moderation occurs, a number of different approaches to the moderation of teacher assessment are currently being considered and piloted:

• The accreditation of teachers, whereby teachers are invited to a standardisation meeting and trained to apply the marking scheme. If they prove capable of marking work correctly and consistently, they are accredited to mark their own students without being subject to normal external moderation. Accreditation is usually restricted in duration to one or two examination sessions and the awarding body reserves the right to carry out spot checks on the marks awarded.
• Consortium moderation, which involves schools and colleges working in groups or clusters to agree marks across the whole group. Teachers from the constituent schools and colleges meet to compare their standards of marking, possibly by means of an agreement trial, where they all mark a common set of work. In the light of this standardisation exercise, they then adjust their own and/or each other's marking in order to bring the marks into line across the group ie to establish a single rank order for the whole group. This may or may not be followed up with external moderation of the group as an entity.
• Statistical moderation, which involves comparing the marks awarded for the teacher assessed component of a specification with the marks for the remaining components or units. Where the teacher-assessed marks seem out of line, statistical adjustments can be applied to bring them within tolerance.