‘In a nutshell: The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to the pupils, demonstrates them …[and] evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding. 

John Hattie, Professor of Education  

When used effectively, formative assessment helps pupils to embed knowledge and use it fluently, and assists teachers in producing clear next steps for pupils.  Teachers can use checking to help them plan lessons, adapt lessons to measured gaps in knowledge and skills, and if necessary re-teach where problems persist.   This page provides information on the principles that underpin formative assessment in the Trust, and the research that supports them 

The research on assessment and long term memory: why is checking important? 

‘Our understanding of the role of long-term memory in human cognition has altered dramatically over the last decades.  It is no longer seen as a passive repository of discrete, isolated fragments of information that permit us to repeat what we have learned…. Rather, long term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition.  Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long term memory. 

Paul Kirschner, Distinguished University Professor, Educational Psychology 

Expertise is a function of long term memory.  Experts have a great deal of subject-specific knowledge in their long term memory.  They are able to think abstractly about this knowledge, recognising conceptual links and the deep structure of problems and situations.  Experts have also mastered complex procedures, committing them to long term memory so that they are performed automatically, without thought (Muijs and Reynolds, 2008; Willingham, 2009).  If we want to inculcate expertise in our pupils then we need to ensure they are able to commit knowledge and procedures to their long term memory. 

This is the guiding cognitive principle running through this chapter.  The Trust’s approach to checking aims to support pupils in developing expertise.  Teachers will design checks whose completion facilitates the commitment of this material to long term memory.  They will subsequently use the outcomes of these checks to help children by providing them with information about how to improve the teaching of this important material. 

There are three recurrent themes that emerge in discussions of committing material to long term memory, and these are detailed below.     

1. The best way to commit material or procedures to long term memory is through regular, distributed practice.  Therefore, frequent checking is a key feature of developing expertise. 

‘The neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger when the memory is retrieved and the learning is practised.  Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain (Brown et al., 2014,   pp.3-4) 

‘Assessments which are specific, frequent, repetitive and recorded as raw marks will help pupils and teachers to see if learning is happening.  In some cases they will even help pupils to learn’ (Christodoulou, 2016, p.176) 

‘learning in a single block can create better immediate performance and higher confidence, but interleaving with other tasks or topics leads to better long-term retention and transfer of skills’ (Coe et al., 2014, p.17) 

‘Pupils often needed three to four exposures to the learning – usually over several days – before there was a reasonable probability that they would learn’  (Hattie, 2012, p.186) 

‘Pupils should do regular tests, once a week maybe, certainly once every two weeks… Then, the pupils are given answers and mark their own work and don’t even tell the teacher unless they want to.’ (Wiliam, in Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017, pp.34-5) 

‘the only path to expertise, as far as anyone knows, is practice’ (Willingham, 2009, p.137) 

2. The best way to practise complex skills is to break them down, isolate their components, and practise those in a process known as deliberate practice.   Often, though not always, these components consist of domain-specific knowledge.  Therefore, checks ought to address the fundamental concepts within a subject. 

‘Whilst skills such as literacy, numeracy, problem solving and critical thinking are still the end point of education, this does not mean that pupils always need to be practising such skills in their final form.  Instead, the role of the teacher, and indeed the various parts of the education system, should be to break down such skills into their component parts and teach those instead.  This means that lessons may look very different from the final skill they are hoping to instil’ (Christodoulou, 2016, p.23) 

‘Bloom…saw knowledge as the basis, the foundation of all thinking…as “the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice” ’ (Didau, in Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017, p.168) 

‘Although [complex] work activities offer some opportunities for learning, they are far from optimal.  In contrast, deliberate practice would allow for repeated experiences in which the individual can attend to the critical aspects of the situations and incrementally improve her or his performance in response to knowledge of results, feedback, or both from a teacher…During a 3-hr baseball game, a batter may get only 5-15 pitches (perhaps one or two relevant to a particular weakness), whereas during optimal practice of the same duration, a batter working with a dedicated pitcher has several hundred batting opportunities, where this weakness can be systematically explored’ (Ericsson et al., 1993, p.368) 

‘domain knowledge trumps text complexity [in determining how well a text is understood], just as it trumps average reading ability and IQ’ (Hirsch, 2016, p.89) 

‘Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not just because you need something to think about.  The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking process such as reasoning and problem solving– are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long term memory’ (Willingham, 2009, p.28) 

3. Teachers must be constantly alert to misunderstandings as their pupils practice, and modify their lessons so that children correct these misunderstandings.  Therefore, teachers will frequently use the outcomes of checks to inform dedicated improvement and reflection time (DIRT). 

‘It’s these ephemeral, real time moments that are happening live in the classroom that matter so much in terms of anticipating, avoiding, correcting misconceptions, keeping pupils on the right track, making sure they’re always understanding what’s happening.  Even if you gave written feedback after each lesson, which is impossible, but if you did give feedback after every lesson it would still not be as good as responsive teaching, which is responding in the class to the issues that are arising in the moment’ (Christodoulou, in Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017, p.40) 

‘the mistake I made was seeing feedback as something teachers provided to pupils… it was only when I discovered that feedback was most powerful when it was from the pupil to the teacher that I started to understand it better.  When teachers seek, or at least are open to, feedback from pupils as to what pupils know, what they understand, where they make errors, when they have misconceptions, when they are not engaged – then teaching and learning can by synchronized and powerful’  (Hattie, 2012, p.173) 

 ‘For pupils, it means gaining information about how and what they understand and misunderstand, finding directions and strategies that they must take to improve, and seeking assistance to understand the goals of the learning. For teachers, it means devising activities and questions that provide feedback to them about the effectiveness of their teaching, particularly so they know what to do next (Hattie and Timperley, 2007, p.102) 

‘Information about the gap between actual and reference levels is considered as feedback only when it is used to alter the gap.  [Not] if the information is simply recorded, passed to a third party…or is too deeply coded (for example as a summary grade given by a teacher) to lead to appropriate action’ (Sadler, 1989, p.121) 

‘I often ask teachers whether they believe that their pupils spend as much time utilizing the feedback they are given as it has taken the teacher to provide it.  Typically, fewer than 1 percent of teachers believe this is the case and this needs to change.  The first fundamental principle of effective classroom feedback is that feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor’ (Wiliam, 2011) 

Putting it all together 

There are two ways you might conceivably set about training an orchestral violinist.  You might present them with a complex piece of music and teach them to follow it, one step at a time.  With repeated practice they may well learn to play the piece, at which point you would present them with another one.  Given enough time, they would develop a repertoire of complex pieces of music. 

More likely, you would start by teaching them notation and scales.  Then you would move onto learning simple pieces, practising playing with accurate rhythm and pitch.  As time went on you would introduce more notation, more complex pieces and they would continue to practise.  Over time the pupil might forget some of the pieces they had played but the key learning, be it the skill of playing, or the knowledge of how pieces are crafted, would remain. 

It may take the second pupil longer to learn their first piece of grade 8 music, and  they may find that repeatedly practising arpeggios might not feel a lot like playing in an orchestra.  In the long run, though, this is the pupil that will develop expertise.  They will have committed the process of playing and knowledge of the rules of music into their long term memory.  Playing is largely automated: not only can they do it correctly, but they can do it without thinking.  This frees their mental energy to concentrate on the rest of the orchestra, improving their performance.  This also provides them with the ability to be creative, manipulating the knowledge and skill they can summon up automatically.   

Football players practise passing drills, chess players practise by studying openings; chefs practise making basic sauces; children learn to read by practising phonics.  In each case, mastery of the basic concepts is the precondition for expertise of complex skills. 

Checking is crucial to this process.  Every practised scale, passing drill or attempt to read is an assessment.  The effort expended on these assessments helps secure deep learning.  The way the teacher responds to the outcomes of these assessments, re-teaching material when it is not fully grasped, or adding a new layer of complexity when something has been grasped, is a large component in the overall effectiveness of their practice, and a key pillar of the Trust’s Quality First Teaching framework. 

References 

Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.  

Christodoulou, D. (2016). Making Good Progress?: The Future of Assessment for Learning. Oxford University Press.  

Coe, R., Aloisi, C., Higgins, S., & Major, L. E. (2014). What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research.  

 Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363.  

 Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.  

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007).  The power of feedback. Review of education research, 77(1), 81-112. 

Hendrick, C., & Macpherson, R. (2017). What Does This Look Like in the Classroom. Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice.  

Hirsch Jr, E. D. (2016). Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories. Harvard Education Press. 8 Story Street First Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.  

Muijs, D., & Reynolds, D. (2017). Effective teaching: Evidence and practice. Sage.  

 Sadler, D. R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional science, 18(2), 119-144.  

 Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Solution Tree Press.  

 Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t pupils like school?: A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. John Wiley & Sons.  

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way. IN Gernsbacjer MA, Pew RW, Hough LM, Pomerantz JR, Psychology in the Real World, New York: Worth.  

 Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.  

 Kromann, C. B., Jensen, M. L., & Ringsted, C. (2009). The effect of testing on skills learning. Medical education, 43(1), 21-27.  

 McDaniel, M. A., Anderson, J. L., Derbish, M. H., & Morrisette, N. (2007). Testing the testing effect in the classroom. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19(4-5), 494-513.  

 Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1432.