Presentation and Justification

This Assessment plan has been created for a unit of work in Natural Science for Year One students. The unit is called "I Eat Well."

Assessment carried out for this unit is continuous (throughout the learning process) and includes both formative and summative assessment activities. The plan includes opportunities for peer and self-assessment, as well as assessment of the students by the teacher. It is criterion-based, and utilizes a variety of tools. Furthermore, it provides for assessment of both content and language.

I will explain and justify each of these aspects in more detail in separate posts, with links here to aid navegation. Each link will open in a new window.


What to assess

When and how to assess

Assessment agents and tools

Measures to ensure reliability and validity

Some images for use in class activities and assessment

Reflection upon implementation of the plan

Reflection upon implementation of the plan

I was only able to put into practice a few of the assessment activities, as we started the unit a bit later than expected. Here is my reflection of my experience.

--Observation checklist. This has been very useful, but requires a second person to do the recording in order not to interrupt the flow of the activity itself. When the language assistant was not available to do this, I had to plan ahead of time more carefully in order to have the recording materials at hand and to know exactly who and what to ask, so as not to lose time scanning the list for names etc.  Also, with 25 students I can only ask a few each day during the whole-class session, so it may be necessary to do some of this assessing not in whole-class activities, but individually at another time. This is difficult because students at this age are not able to work independently very well so I have to be continuously monitoring and helping and there is not much time for pulling students aside for individual oral assessments, however brief.

--Peer assessment of boardwork. This has worked very well, because when students know they will be asked to check their peers' work, they pay more attention, which helps them learn more as well.

--Group work.activities in class. While this is useful for getting a general picture of how well the class is assimilating the contents, it is less effective to know the extent to which individual students have understood. Since groups are working simultaneously, it is impossible to monitor them all at once, so while a finished product may be correct, we don’t know exactly who has contributed and to what extent.  In some cases, students create their own record of what was done afterward (drawing), which I can then assess, but we don't always have time for this.

One situation that has arisen that complicates assessment is when students are absent from class, and therefore miss activities that I have used for assessment as well as learning. Due to the nature of the activities (it is not written work) there is no good way for them to make up what they have missed, which impacts both the learning and assessment process.

I have not yet administered the written exam, as we have not completed the unit, but I foresee some potential problems based on my experience with other exams. The main problem is that there are students who need a lot of support when doing any type of worksheet or written activity in English, and while they may understand the contents being tested, they have difficulty completing the exam independently. I have tried to minimise this by making the exam tasks as simple and familiar as possible, but I am not sure how it will work out. 

Measures to ensure reliability and validity

As I mentioned earlier, with children so young, many issues impact the reliability and validity of the exam. We cannot entirely solve these difficulties, but we can take some measures to make our assessment as reliable and valid as possible under the circumstances.

An exam is considered to have construct validity when it measures only what it is supposed to. In our case, this means that I will read aloud the exam questions and directions so that students are not penalised for difficulty in reading and understanding them independently, as this is not a skill that I intend to measure. Also, the images used must be clear and easy to interpret.

Content validity means that the exam contains a representative sample of what it is to measure. To this end, we can create a specification of skills that the exam is meant to cover, and in this case the specification would be closely related to the assessment criteria.

To increase reliability of the exam, it is helpful if the students are familiar with the exam format. For this reason, the exam tasks are very similar to activities we have done in class. I will also make sure scoring is objective by not including ambiguous items. Since I create my own exam, it will be helpful to have some of my colleagues look at it first to see if they can spot any ambiguities. In this case, these might include foods that could arguably belong to more than one category (if they are included, it should be specified in the exam key that both answers are acceptable.)

An exam is more reliable when it has a greater number of items, rather than just a few. However, with such young learners, having a lot of items on the test would lead them to get fatigued, bored, etc. and would lower the overall reliability of the exam rather than raising it.  It is a difficult balance, but we can compensate to some degree by taking into consideration other evidence of student performance (eg. class activities) to complement the information gained from the exam.

Some images for use in class activities and assessment

Visual aids form a very important part of the scaffolding we give our students as they learn. I will use the same or similar images in the final assessment.

Our textbook comes with a set of flashcards with the key vocabulary (pictures and also word cards for each key word) as well as a variety of additional, smaller cards with different pictures that can be used for sorting, manipulating, etc. These additional cards represent words that are used while carrying out class activities but which students are not expected to learn for asssessment purposes.

I have collected these additional images to help demonstrate the key concepts, as these are not included in our method. I will also use these images on the written exam.

To work on raw vs. cooked foods:

To work on "It goes in the fridge" and "It goes in the cupboard":

To work on different times of day for the different meals:

To work on the traffic light idea for classifying foods we should eat daily, sometimes, and not often:

Assessment tools and agents

Observation of class activities. The finished products, whether collages on posterboard, flashcards stuck on the board under different categories, food packets sorted into plastic rings from the gymnasium, etc. will always be subject to peer assessment, as we check together to decide if students agree with their classmates’ choices.

In one activity, after students have explored the difference between foods that must be kept cold and foods that need not be, they will cut out pictures of food and stick them onto a paper in the correct category: "It goes in the fridge" and "It goes in the cupboard".  The language demands of the activity are minimal, but the finished product will show understanding of the concept. After completion, students check together to see if they are correct, and assess their own work, making any necessary changes.

In another activity, students work in groups to make a collage of foods to be eaten at different mealtimes, and then each group can present their work for peer review. 

After discussing which foods are healthy and how often certain foods should be eaten, they will place food cards in the correct coloured ring: red for those foods that should not be eaten very often; yellow for foods that can be eaten sometimes, and green for foods that should be eaten daily.  Students give each other feedback as the activity is being carried out (peer assessment), and afterward they each complete a chart by drawing different foods in the correct categories.  The teacher will then check the papers to see how individual students have done.

Each of these activities also provide the teacher with an opportunity to observe and gather evidence about how well pupils are assimilating the contents, allowing for the adjustment of teaching when necessary.

Written register/observation checklists will be used to make sure students are capable of producing the language while doing the activity. For example, “I have to cook it.”  “I can eat it raw” as they stick the flashcard on the right side of the board.  Also as a warm-up a few students each day will be asked to identify vocabulary from the flashcards, to be marked down in the checklist. The language assistant and/or the teacher will be in charge of completing the checklist, so this is heteroassessment.

Written exam.  At the completion of the unit, a written exam will be administered. Activities on the exam will be very similar to those carried out in class. Exam tasks include:  drawing foods for the different meals, circling with a different colour according to category (raw or cooked, refrigerator or cupboard),  colouring food pictures according to how often they should be eaten, matching the word with the picture, choosing from a word bank and copying the correct word under a picture.

One difficulty with this type of exam (coloring, circling, drawing, etc) is that it is very easy for students to see at a glance what their classmates have done. They still do not really understand the concept of  “exam,” and they want to help each other, check their answers against a classmate’s etc. In class, they sit at tables of two which cannot be separated, and cheating is very hard to prevent.  

As far as validity and reliability of the exam,  children this young (6 years old) are greatly affected by any number of factors that interfere with their performance and thus with the validity of any assessment. If the class period is at the end of the day, or right after break or physical education class, if they have had a conflict with a classmate prior to the activity, if there is a situation at home that affects them, if they are hungry, tired, bored, etc.

For these reasons, a summative exam is often not a very reliable or valid measure of what students have learnt. We must use it, and attempt to make it as reliable as possible, but it is necessary to complement the assessment with observation of class activities and work in order to have a better idea of what students know and are capable of.

Given the importance of observation, our observation tools and procedures must be carefully considered in order to make them as useful as possible. This means making them very specific (exactly what is to be observed). In the examples above, this means preparing a register with the expected language (vocabulary and structures) for the teacher to mark as the students use it correctly or incorrectly during the activity.

When and how to assess

Assessment in this unit is continuous, which means it takes place at different moments throughout the learning process. In each lesson, class activities provide opportunities for formative assessment, and at the end of the unit a written test will serve as a summative assessment.

At the beginning of first grade, children are still learning the mechanics of reading and writing, and of course their grasp of English as a foreign language is still very limited. Therefore, visual aids and images are extremely important both for teaching and for assessment. The amount of language students are expected to produce is very small. Even in non-bilingual schools, science exams at this level may often consist mainly of tasks such as “Circle the correct drawing” “Sort  the pictures into the proper categories” etc to minimize productive language demands in the assessment of content.

It is necessary to divide language into receptive and productive. In class, students will be asked to produce short sentences, with sentence stems or models given, as well as vocabulary (names of different foods and types of foods).  Additionally, through the use of gesture and visual aids they will be able to understand language they are not yet capable of producing reliably on their own. This receptive language is not an explicit object of assessment, but it forms an important part of learning in English.

As far as how to assess, assessment activities and classwork activities will be very similar. In class we will use flashcards, pictures that students have brought, food packets, etc. in order to classify items according to various criteria (raw vs. cooked foods, foods that is stored in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, foods to be eaten daily, sometimes, or not often, etc.)  These classroom activities provide opportunities for continuous/ formative assessment, and in this way fulfill a double duty. 

On the written exam at the end of the unit (summative assessment), they will be asked to draw foods for different categories, colour according to category, and match the word with the picture and also choose from a word bank and copy the correct word under a picture, to test language aims.  These are all activities with which they should be familiar, since they have done similar things in class.

One form of scaffolding on the written exam will be the use of images in many of the activities, as well as the use of word banks and matching exercises (image and word) to measure reading and writing skills.  As mentioned earlier, speaking activities will be assessed as an ongoing part of classwork, rather than as a specific part of the summative exam. In the case that it is necessary, students can be given many opportunities to master the speaking objectives, and if this cannot be managed for everyone in a whole-class setting, they may be pulled aside individually for a quick speaking assessment.  

For this assessment of speaking skills, a carefully-planned observation register will be employed.

What to Assess

This plan is criterion-based;  therefore it will assess students' ability to demonstrate mastery of a specific set of criteria. In this case, the assessment criteria are derived from  the current legislation with regard to the curriculum, specifically that of Natural Science for Year One.

Learning intentions for the unit include:

1) Identify and value healthy habits to prevent illness

2) Understand the benefits of healthy eating habits.

In order to determine whether these intentions have been met, we must develop assessment criteria that reflect observable behaviour.  In this case, they will be:

1.1 Classifies foods according to whether they are eaten raw or cooked
1.2 Identifies foods which must be kept cool and foods which can be kept at room temperature

2.1 Identifies foods which should be eaten daily, sometimes, and infrequently
2.2 Identifies the five meals which should be eaten throughout the day for a balanced diet


Since this is a CLIL subject, we will also assess language use. The related assessment criteria are:

--Correctly uses the key vocabulary of the unit 
--Uses language structures to express relevant concepts
--Reads the key vocabulary words and associates the written word to the correct image
--Correctly writes the vocabulary words following a model.