Redesigning Schooling – 8: Principled assessment design

This challenging pamphlet “Redesigning Schooling – Principled assessment design” by Dylan Wiliam comes at an important moment. With the removal of national curriculum levels from September, Wiliam argues forcefully that schools must develop their own way of assessing children’s progress, and that this moment represents an ‘extraordinary opportunity’ to design an assessment system that is ‘the servant, not the master, of the learning’.

The premise of this pamphlet is that any assessment system should be designed to support the curriculum in place in a school, rather than having the curriculum designed to fit the assessment system. Or to put it another way, assessment should be the servant, not the master, of the learning.

The freedom presented by the recent changes is obviously a little daunting since schools are losing the support on which they have relied for many years – indeed most of our teachers have known nothing else. But the opportunity to design an assessment system that works for the school, rather than the other way round, represents an extraordinary
opportunity for schools.

Wiliams guides us through a nuanced way of thinking about assessment that should underpin the design of any model: knowing the limitations of types of assessment and the impact these have on the inferences you make; defining what you will assess and the purpose for which you will use the data; how you will collect, share and/or record it; and, critically, how you can design assessment systems that first and foremost support teaching and learning. ‘Good summative assessment requires teachers to share a construct of quality, while good formative assessment requires helping students share the same construct of quality.’