Assessment Group

The work of the King’s Assessment Group into Assessment for Learning (AfL) over the last ten years was based on the 1998 review of research by Black and Wiliam entitled Assessment and Classroom Learning. A booklet which summarised that review and discussed the implications of its findings was also published in 1998. It was entitled Inside the Black Box: raising standards through classroom assessment. This work was initiated by the Assessment Reform Group (ARG), with grants from the Nuffield Foundation.

The initial Assessment work was then developed through collaboration with schools. The King’s-Medway-Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project (KMOFAP) started in 1999, with support and funding from the US National Science Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation, for two years. A distinguishing feature of this project has been the strong interaction between development of practice and research. This led to a further booklet Working Inside the Black Box, and a book for teachers Assessment for Learning: putting it into practice. Both of these have proved to be very popular.
The KMOFAP project’s success in developing the implementation of formative practice in classrooms led to a number of other professional development projects and consultancies in the area of classroom assessment. These included our leading role in the Assessment is for Learning Project in Scotland, which initially was a national project with a small number of primary and secondary schools in each of the local authorities (LA) and developed into more intensive implementation at local authority level as part of a follow-on project. A second project was undertaken in States of Jersey, which led the island to remove national testing at KS1, KS2 and KS3 in order to set up the culture for developing AfL practice successfully.
Two other projects in Stirling and Stockton-on-Tees enabled the group to further develop the collaborative action research approach of the KMOFAP project and led to teachers documenting and evidencing their professional learning journeys. Ideas and ways of working from these projects have been influential in supporting the implementation of AfL in many schools and local authorities in the UK and abroad, and we have also responded to numerous request to give talks and lead INSETS, from LAs and from individual schools.

From 2005-2008, as part of a science education initiative, a further research project was undertaken focusing on evidence-based professional development programmes across six domains of science: one of these domains was classroom assessment. This was a collaborative endeavour with the Weizman Institute in Israel. Findings from this project have led to several papers on the formative use of teacher portfolios and the role of professional development scenarios in bridging the gap between pedagogic awareness and understanding of practice.
Another new project is an international initiative, funded by the EU, to develop assessment for learning by collaboration between groups in Denmark, Italy, Norway and the UK (for further information contact jane.jones@kcl.ac.uk ).
 
The focus on formative assessment has produced a substantial corpus of theoretical and empirical work covering a range of curriculum domains. At present the active areas of research and development include:

• The theory of formative assessment and its role within pedagogy
• Differences between different school subjects in their formative assessment practices
• Alignment of empirically tested models of progression in science learning with matching test instruments to serve both formative and summative purposes
• Formative assessment principles and practices for pupils with English as an Additional Language
• E-assessment and summative assessment

Members of the Assessment Group contribute to the PGCE, Masters, EdD and MPhil/PhD programmes, and to specific courses for continuous professional development by teachers.
 
Master's in Assessment in Education
The group will be introducing a new MA Assessment in Education in 2009/10.
 
MPhil/PhD
As a research group with an established international reputation, we invite applications for doctoral studies from prospective MPhil/PhD students.

• Paul Black
• Anne-Marie Brandom
• Margaret Brown
• Christine Harrison
• Jeremy Hodgen
• Jane Jones
• Clive Kanes
• Constant Leung
• Bethan Marshall
• Natasha Serret
• Mary Webb
• Chris Winch

Clare Lee was a strong contributor to the KMOFAP: she is now an assessment advisor for the Warwickshire LEA.

Dylan Wiliam was one of the founding members of the group when he was at King's, and although he now works at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, USA, as a visiting professor at King's he maintains active contact with the group, his main role at ETS being to direct their development of formative assessment.

You can find out more information on seminars involving members of the
Assessment Group
by visiting.

See a selected list of the Assessment Group's publications
.