Assessment in Dance
Assessment in Stages 4 and 5 Dance
Formative assessment
Assessment for learning involves formative assessment—assessing students over time in a series of activities and tasks to ensure that they are progressing towards the achievement of focus outcomes within a unit of work.
Formative assessment should be focused on observing students as they learn and providing feedback to them to assist them to progress towards outcomes. When you are observing your students you will have criteria in your mind, the same task criteria you have stated or negotiated with students. Feedback to students will help them to identify areas of strength and areas requiring development.
Strategies for observations:
• base observations on learning outcomes and on task criteria
• in day-to-day observations target several students, rather than try to provide meaningful feedback to all
• observations and feedback can be immediate and left unrecorded
• if you are recording observations use simple lists or grids—over-assessing using complex schemas defeats the whole purpose of using assessment to optimise learning
Providing meaningful feedback:
• use task criteria as the basis for both oral and written feedback
• provide positive reinforcement of individual strengths
• provide constructive comments about areas requiring further development
• provide whole-class feedback that summarises your observations
• provide opportunities for peer feedback
• provide opportunities for student self-assessment that can form the basis of discussion and feedback
Summative assessment
Summative assessment is comprehensive and records the extent to which students have met the outcomes in a unit of work. Summative assessment is usually completed at the end of the unit.
Assessment tasks that are summative need to be developed with a clear description, explicit criteria, and a marking scheme (marking guidelines) that students can understand. Formative assessment can feed into summative assessment, for example, self assessment over time may be incorporated into a task description.
Summative assessment is assessment for learning, in that it can inform selection of content and strategies in subsequent units of work.
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