Leading, teaching and learning
Making Assessment Change By Janelle Torres
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any schools are making changes to assessment. Across the international school sector, the rate of assessment change is broad, and the range of solutions wide. The ISC Research report published this year, Future of Assessment in International Schools, explored how international schools are managing their assessment change and identified some of the common challenges they are facing. Although some international schools have been working towards change for several years, COVID-19 was the catalyst for many more such schools. The need to submit teacher-assessed grades as an alternative to external examinations highlighted the challenges of summative assessment. This, coupled with a need to know more about the students, and their wellbeing in addition to their learning progress, resulted in a significant shift towards data-gathering in order for teachers to make informed judgements to support personalised learning. 73% of the international schools that we have researched (mostly in the premium fee and mid-market fee sectors) told us they are now using digital platforms as part of their student assessment. 77% said they had used new forms of digital assessment during campus closures in order to gather and analyse data. The advancement of technology skills by school staff, along with the technology solutions increasingly available, are enabling some schools to move towards more authentic personalised learning, informed by rigorous and efficient approaches to formative assessment. Our research tells us that most international school leaders agree on the value of formative assessment, which may be the reason for the increasing number of schools using it to differentiate learning.
22 | International School | Summer 2022
However, it’s not an easy change, as school leaders we have interviewed make clear.
The advancement of technology skills by school staff, along with the technology solutions increasingly available Challenges for a small school Myna Anderson is the Director of Banjul American International School in The Gambia: a remote international school with 64 students, limited resources, poor internet access, and staff who have to take multiple roles. ‘Our teachers understand how to set standards, how to identify what they’re looking for, but still feel more comfortable calculating a percentage grade instead of truly assessing against standards‘, Myna told us. ‘I think it’s a safety net; they feel safe if there’s a calculation, that it’s not subjective when they use numbers to make the current determination.’ Most school management data systems are out of the school’s budget range. ‘All schools should have access to an open-source solution; something out there for anybody, like us,
a school faculty that knows what good teaching and learning look like and who want to use a system, but simply can’t afford it‘, she added.
The catalyst for change At The Columbus School in Colombia, which serves 1,800 children, the pandemic has been a catalyst for change. ‘COVID made it challenging for teachers to rely on traditional assessments, so many teachers started
