Making Sense of Baseline Assessment

Book Description
All children staring compulsory schooling at age four to five will be “baseline assessed” from September 1998. As usual in national assessment, the purposes are blurred, with teachers hoping for child-centred, formative information that will help guide their teaching, and the administrators wanting numerical data for “value-added” measures of performance and progress. Unusually there are lots of different QCA-accredited schemes, all reconciling the different assessment purposes in different ways and all producing data which are open to different interpretations. This text aims to help to get the most out of baseline assessment and guide its practical uses and interpretations (including value-added and target-setting), pointing to the strengths and weaknesses of different types of assessment and suggesting how results can be communicated to parents.