Leading assessment
The first 100 days
So, you’ve been put in charge of assessment at your school? What now?
If you’ve been given a job description, it probably lists things like organising the end-of-year assessments, coordinating data collection, identifying students requiring intervention, overseeing moderation and administrating reports to parents. It may include delivering professional development for teachers, monitoring classroom assessment practice, and quality assuring departments.
Perhaps this responsibility is only a part of a wider remit, like teaching and learning. Or perhaps this is your first whole-school role and assessment has been carved out as a stand-alone responsibility. Either way, it is no small task.
During the interview, your headteacher may have set out what they would like you to achieve in the role - to have a more robust understanding of student progress, to tighten up procedures for controlled assessment, to increase the frequency of formative assessment.
The reality of the job (as for many jobs in schools) is that there aren’t enough hours in the day. It is all the more important, therefore, to have a clear purpose and priorities before you start.
The purpose of assessment
As we have argued previously, the purpose of assessment is to promote learning. This unifying goal will not only help you stay focussed on what is important but it will also provide a handrail for decision making across the school - a North Star.
A North Star is needed because, despite what your job description suggests, assessment in schools is not a system but an ecosystem.
Over the course of your first year in post, millions of assessment decisions will be made, and only a few of these by you. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is actually a pragmatic estimate.
To understand why, first think about the scope of assessment practice. Every day, in every lesson, teachers are making multiple assessments of what students know and don’t know. At the most granular level, this may be a simple question directed to one student in the class. Or it may be a method which garners information from the whole class, such as mini-whiteboards or a quiz. Then there are more formal assessment practices like end-of-unit tests. Teachers are constantly making decisions about when, what and how to assess, and each of these decisions has consequences.
And each time students are subject to being assessed, they make decisions about how to respond. This complex web of decision making leads to human behaviours which can be harnessed to further learning.
And like the interacting agents in a natural ecosystem, people in your school are not acting in isolation. Each is adapting to the environment they are in. Teachers are subject to the systems, expectations, culture, and peer influences within the school, not to mention the national examinations framework and accountability system. Students care less about their absolute performance in assessments than how this compares to others, how this affects their sense of self, and what the real-world consequences may be.
Understanding the complexity of the assessment ecosystem is perhaps your first task. We write more about it here. The point, however, is that you cannot hope to control this ecosystem, but you can influence decisions by ensuring that the North Star of learning is front and centre of peoples’ minds. Your constant refrain should be to ask “How does this promote learning?”
A multi-disciplinary approach
What does it mean to be an expert in school assessment?
Assessment experts outside of schools would answer ‘psychometrics’, the discipline that deals with psychological measurement. This is undoubtably true. However, leading assessment in schools is a multi-disciplinary task.
Assessment leads first require an understanding of the curriculum, most importantly what makes subject disciplines distinct from each other, including their knowledge architecture. There is a reason that subjects lean towards different forms of assessment and it is that the meaning of progress differs across disciplines. Assessment leads who do not understand this risk imposing generic practices on subjects that do harm.
Next, an understanding of human behaviour is required. If we are to promote learning, assessment should promote positive and productive behaviour by students. This includes initiating and sustaining study, making effort during an assessment, and responding to assessment outcomes in a beneficial way. Motivation matters in assessment. As assessment lead, it is your job to ensure teachers understand how assessment weighs on students and why students choose to respond in different ways towards being assessed, including what they believe about their ability.
To ensure that valid inferences are made about what students know and don’t know, some degree of understanding about cognition is required. Inferring what students know from their correct answers is one thing, but perhaps more difficult is what we can infer from incorrect or partial responses.
Assessment leads should be the expert in assessment design. This includes decisions about the scope of an assessment, question choice (including how open tasks should be used, the design of closed tasks such as multiple choice questions, and question order), and how to sample effectively from the domain of knowledge in question.
Last but not least is the pedagogic expertise, managerial skill, and the ability to implement effective assessment systems. Assessment leads will make decisions about how to report to parents and what to tell them, run formal assessments, ensure the efficiency of assessment, interpret cohort data to discriminate between students, and design a cross-department assessment framework that is valid and meaningful.
The breadth of knowledge required is significant, so to make the job manageable it may help to focus on three mechanisms that come into play.
How does assessment influence learning?
There are three mechanisms at work in the assessment ecosystem:
The expectation of inference: the way the assessment affects student behaviour even before the assessment takes place.
The testing effect: the learning gained through being assessed.
The consequences of inference: how the inferences made about students affect subsequent behaviour.
This framing provides a way for assessment leads to understand and influence assessment practice to achieve the goal of promoting learning. We have written about these mechanisms in some detail here, but the core concepts are as follows:
The expectation of inference
Before a test even takes place, students anticipate that an inference will be made about their learning, and this expectation shapes their actions. How strongly it influences them depends on how much the assessment matters to them.
Anticipating a future assessment directs students' attention towards specific knowledge as they form beliefs about what might be included. Teachers influence this by choosing how much to reveal about the content. Since attentional capacity is limited, students prioritise what they believe will be assessed. This expectation helps establish a hierarchy of knowledge, guiding students on where to invest their time and effort.
But directing attention alone is not enough. Students must also:
Care about doing well.
Believe they can succeed.
Know how to succeed.
When all these factors align—attention directed, motivation high, belief in success intact, and a clear path to achievement—the expectation of inference triggers productive learning behaviours. Students are more likely to study, participate, concentrate, and persist. Over time, this builds self-efficacy, a positive academic self-concept, and a reinforcing expectation of future success.
However, the reverse is also true. If students expect failure, do not see the value of assessment, or lack the tools to succeed, the expectation of inference can demotivate rather than inspire.
The testing effect
Assessments are often seen as taking time away from instruction, but substantial evidence shows that testing itself is a powerful learning tool. These benefits include strengthening the storage of knowledge in long-term memory through retrieval, which reduces forgetting. As psychologist Robert Bjork notes, “using our memory shapes our memories”—each time we recall knowledge, we reinforce neural connections, improving future retrieval.
Learning during assessments involves more than just recall; it also strengthens encoding by forming new neural connections and reinforcing existing ones. This improves the accessibility of both tested and untested knowledge, making learning more flexible and transferable.
Assessments also prime students for future learning by bringing prior knowledge to the forefront. When students retrieve information, they integrate new content more effectively. Tests also promote metacognition, helping students identify gaps in understanding and refine their study strategies.
The consequences of inference
The act of inference, a mainstay of assessment literature, only comes into play after the assessment is complete. On its own, inference —the process of drawing conclusions from assessment data—does not affect learning. What matters is how the information is used: Who sees it? In what form? What decisions follow?
Assessment results influence multiple stakeholders:
Teachers may reteach content, target support, or identify struggling students.
Parents may praise or chastise their child, supervise study more closely, or hire a tutor.
School leaders may interpret results as a reflection on teaching quality or predict future performance, directing resources accordingly.
Students may adjust their self-concept, motivation, or subject choices based on feedback.
Each of these responses can enhance or hinder learning, depending on how the information is presented and interpreted.
The first 100 days
Who are we to tell you how to do your job? Your to-do list is probably already stacked. However, if we are able to offer a little advice…
Perhaps start by learning as much as you can about your school’s assessment ecosystem. What happens? How do people justify what happens? What is their intent and to what extent is this intent achieved? Central to understanding the school’s ecosystem is understanding students’ behaviour and how assessment weighs on them.
You can use the three mechanisms above to structure your enquiry. Which of these mechanisms is deliberately or accidentally engaged? Your role is no no small part about maximising the leverage of these causal chains.
Pay attention to the diversity of practice and the reasons for this diversity. How do subjects differ in their approaches? Does assessment practice change as students move up through the school? How consistent are teachers within departments?
Next, establish the level of expertise that exists throughout the school and where there are gaps. What do you want every teacher to understand about assessment? You could even draw up a curriculum for teachers as a basis for professional development.
Once you feel you understand the assessment ecosystem well enough, think about how to align practice around the North Star of learning. In essence, you can influence beliefs (about the purpose of assessment), increase expertise, re-engineer systems, calibrate assessment practices, decommission less impactful practices, and shine a light on things that work. Remember to manage upwards as well as downwards, ensuring that everyone with a stake in assessment develops a shared understanding of purpose and priorities.
Assessment is a huge domain, so above all keep it simple and don’t try to do everything. And don’t neglect your own development - we’re here for you in that regard.
Good luck!
A really helpful and informative piece.