Being serious about improving student outcomes: bringing the issues of quality, standards and teacher judgement to centre stage

Currently, few would openly challenge the notion that assessment, teaching, and learning are fundamentally interrelated in good practice. Beyond this, however, there remains much debate about what should be assessed and how assessment should properly occur — in short, what assessment evidence should be most valued and used for reporting purposes. This presentation starts from two propositions: first, that large-scale standardised testing, of itself, does not lead to improvement; and second, that if we are serious about improving student outcomes, it is time to reassert the centrality of teacher judgement, explicitly defined standards, and literacy and numeracy as cross-curricular priorities. Drawing on a current study of teacher capacity building in assessment, participants will be invited to consider characteristics of "assessment for learning" including the matching of curriculum intent to both learning and assessment opportunities. Of special interest will be teachers' own accounts of how they have developed and worked with stated assessment criteria and standards in their classrooms, both to improve student learning and to judge the quality of student work.