Assessment in D&T: An Overview

I'm now moving on to thinking about assessment in design and technology and in this episode I'm just going to give an overview of the next few episodes . So this kind of just gives you an awareness about what's coming and gives you a bit of a framework for thinking about assessment in design and technology .

So the first thing we need to think about is what is assessment for in D&T ? Okay , so the research around assessment ? It's around their learning , the D&T curriculum and their progress in meeting the aims of design and technology , as we've discussed in earlier episodes , particularly in the context of their developing design and technology capability .

And assessment is fit for this purpose when it is reliable and valid . So that means it can be repeated and there is an accuracy in the marking , at other people marking it , and it is come up with the same grades , the same marks , and also that it is actually assessing what we think it's assessing .

Okay , so we've got these two individual parts of assessment in design and technology . This is what the literature says back from when I was talking about what the aims , what the curriculum and intent is of D&T .

There's the specific aspects of their design or technological knowledge and or technological knowledge , if you remember , that's on a spectrum and don't forget we're talking about knowledge that incorporates the language of skills around procedural and conceptual , so that adds an extra dimension that the assessment of individual parts of the curriculum sometimes are around cognitive

recall , but sometimes are around physical recall in terms of them being able to do a process and demonstrate the use of , and they might have different levels of skill in doing that .

And then we've got this feature of design and technology capability that emerges as pupils progress through their design and technology learning , as their knowledge grows , their experience grows , and so we have to think about how do we assess these two in a way that is valid and reliable .

So if we think about this individual aspects , individual knowledge , these tend to happen through formative quick tests , quick recall questions , quick demonstrations from pupils about things , and also summative assessment , again a written , more formal test , or it might be a practice test in terms of it's practical , it's seen it's not a written test and then really the

overall assessment for design and technology capability is better to be summative . It's very difficult to evaluate design and technology capability formatively . What you're really doing when you're doing formative assessment is looking at the individual components that may or may not be used when you're assessing design and technology capability .

That may or may not be used when you're assessing design and technology capability , because , don't forget , when children are responding autonomously to a design and technology context , they are choosing what individual aspects of knowledge practice experience that they're drawing on . So you can't predetermine what they're going to do .

So that's why design and technology capability is assessed summatively and not in sort of individual little parts . It's more holistic and I'll be talking about that really specifically when I do a podcast episode about assessing D&T capability and what the research says . So just some kind of warnings there is .

Design and technology capability let's just recap is about holistic assessment , which is more reliable and valid , and there's much , much more research about that .

But assessing knowledge components may well be done more through multiple choice , through recall , through an exam , through an extended essay , through a short design activity or the description of a flowchart or a process , for example .

So you might want to think , whether you're in primary or secondary , how you are assessing those two things and how you're making sure that you are assessing what you think you're assessing and that it's reliable . Okay , that it's not just you and your own bias . Actually it is reliable and we're talking about that in some future episodes .

Some things here for you to think about is are your current assessments capturing what you intend them to capture ? Are the tests capturing those individual knowledge , components or skills , or are you projecting and saying that's their D&T capability ? So just think about that and remember that effective assessment is about supporting learning .

It's supporting that progress . It's a feeding in for the pupils and it's a feeding in for you as the teacher . So have a think about your current assessments . The next three episodes will also be on assessment . The next one is about what does the research say about assessing design and technological knowledge ? Not a lot . There's a quick heads up .

The next one after that will look at at formative assessment , thinking about design , crit and peer feedback , what the literature says about that , and the final episode in this mini series within the series , we'll look at what the research says about summative assessment of design and technology capability .

So listen out for those and hopefully you'll do some reflecting in the meantime on your own assessment approaches . I'm Dr Alison Hardy and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast . If you enjoyed the podcast , then do subscribe , on whatever platform you use , and do consider leaving a review , as it does help others find the podcast .

I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice , so please do share the podcast with your D&T community . If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode , then either leave me a voice memo via Speakpipe or drop me an email .

You can find details about me , the podcast and how to connect with me on my website , dralisonhardycom . Also , if you want to support the podcast financially , you can become a patron . Links to SpeakPipe , patreon and my website are in the show notes . Thanks for listening .