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Tech tools

Most children enjoy ICT classes, but how do you assess their progress when they’re working on computers, often in pairs? Matt Bradley has a few ideas.

Why assess in ICT?

For most children the ICT suite is a wonderful place. I have yet to meet a child who did not love going to ICT. In fact in one school I worked in, a girl in reception learned the days of the week so that she could be prepared for the day when her ICT lesson was taking place. “Mr Bradley,” she would say, “I’m so excited because it’s Monday and in two days we have ICT!”

ICT plays an important part in the primary curriculum, and rightly so. In today’s Britain it is impossible to spend even a single day without coming into contact with some form of ICT, whether it be the computers we use for research on the internet or the mobile phones we keep within reaching distance even when we sleep. Assessment in ICT is just as important as in any other subject, because even though children may be having fun, we cannot expect good progress unless we understand how to move them forward.

Assessment in planning

When teaching ICT, I find that assessment is best considered before all other planning takes place. Using long-term plans to identify key skills that should be learned and assessed, and then amalgamating them into a single unit of work, will allow you to create fun lessons in your medium-term plan. For example, if in one half-term the students need to learn how to change font colours and text formats, and how to create a piece of artwork on the computer in the style of a famous artist, simply turn these into learning intentions (these will be your assessment criteria), such as:

• I can use the internet to research

• I can use ICT to create artwork

• I can change the format of text

• I can use a word processor to type a piece of work.

Why not use the internet to research the artist, create the artwork and then have the children write about what they did? At the end of the unit you will have several interlinked pieces of work which are easy to assess and will look good on the wall.

By attaching success criteria to each learning intention, you can further guide the children on which skills you would like them to develop. I find three success criteria to be ideal as this makes it easy to record progress using the triangle method of assessment (each success criteria correlates to one side of the triangle, so children who have achieved all of the criteria will have a full triangle under that column of your assessment sheet).

If the children save each new piece of work in the same folder, you can easily go through the whole class’s work in a quarter of an hour. With four learning intentions, this equals an hour per half-term! For those who want the children to be able to self-assess their progress, print out the learning intentions on a sheet for each child at the end of the unit and they can use these to write down how confident they are at each one.

Assessment and feedback in lessons

I like to keep the demonstration sections of my ICT lessons to a maximum of 15 minutes, as the children will begin to forget how to navigate through the various menus if you go any longer than this. In Key Stage 1 this time will be broken into two or three sections as I call the children back to the carpet to show them how to access different features of whatever programme they are using.

This means you will have a lot of time to provide feedback to each child individually, based on your formative/ observational assessments. If you are lucky enough to have a computer for each child in the class then this will not be a problem, but if the children are sharing computers, I like to ‘switch’ halfway through – the child who started on the computer will no longer be using the equipment but will instead have to explain their ideas to their partner. This helps to build

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