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Assessment of students' uses of evidence
Teaching History article
Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced. Approaching the...
Assessment of students' uses of evidence
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No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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Building and assessing learner autonomy within the Key Stage 3 history classroom
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Oliver Knight is an experienced Advanced Skills Teacher who has taught in four different secondary schools, three of them multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural and at least two wrestling with significant problems arising from social deprivation....
Building and assessing learner autonomy within the Key Stage 3 history classroom
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A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
Teaching History article
The need to understand ways of defining progression in history becomes ever more pressing in the face of a target-setting, assessment-driven regime which requires us to measure progress at every turn. We must defend our professional expertise in terms of measurable outcomes. Did we add value? Have our end of...
A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
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Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
Teaching History article
Dale Banham continues a theme explored by many other teacher-authors in recent years, how to ensure that progression does not just stop in Year 9, leaving pupils stagnant in key areas of historical learning before getting picked up again in Year 12. He produces a more thorough rationale and commentary...
Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Assessment after levels
Free Teaching History article
Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment for learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown argued that...
Assessment after levels
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'Assessing Pupil Progress'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
England's Qualification and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) has been working on a new way of trying to support teachers in handling interim assessment during Key Stage 3. It is called Assessing Pupil Progress (APP).
Jerome...
'Assessing Pupil Progress'
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Creating controversy in the classroom: making progress with historical significance
Teaching History article
No longer is historical significance the ‘forgotten key element.’ Indeed, it is now being remembered at last – by politicians, telly-dons and the media in any case. Matthew Bradshaw suggests that the popular emphasis on significant events is wrong. Instead, we should be enabling our pupils to make their own...
Creating controversy in the classroom: making progress with historical significance
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Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
During her PGCE year, it became evident to Rachel Coleman just how much pupils struggled with the complicated nature of history. They were troubled in particular by the lack of definitive answers, by the range of perspectives that might be held at the time of a particular event or development...
Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
Teaching History article
Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation.
It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...
Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
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Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem:Joe Priestley is having problems providing sufficient challenge for the higher attainers within his mixed ability groups
Joe Priestley has settled into his training placement very well and has impressed other members of the history department with his lively and engaging ideas.
In his early teaching he was...
Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
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Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
Progression & Assessment
In the 2014 national curriculum for primary and secondary history one of the key differences is that, for the first time since 1991, there are no level descriptions against which you can assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils...
Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
