Assessment

At Uckfield College, we track each student’s progress closely.  Through careful assessment for learning, students are given regular, specific feedback on their work in all subjects.  This is recorded in the student’s digital Learning Organiser, enabling the student themselves, their parents and their form mentor to be clear about what it is they are striving to improve and develop.  If a student requires additional support to reach their targets, this will be provided by their teacher in the form of differentiated work, or sometime in additional teaching sessions

We believe that assessment should measure and inform us of the extent to which our students have reached the curriculum end points. Our end points are very clear because of our highly developed curriculum intent.

Assessment can take many forms at Uckfield College including  ‘Hinge Questions’ (short and specific questions designed to quickly assess understanding), short assessment tasks in class, PIN tasks, summative tests and trial exams.
PIN tasks are assessments in which students are informed of the Positive aspects of their work, given strategies to Improve their work and are required to respond with some further work to be done Now.
More detail of PIN tasks is set out in the Uckfield College Feedback Policy

There are many benefits of high quality assessment:

• The students benefit from retrieval practice (the testing effect)
• Gaps in knowledge and understanding can be identified by students and teachers
• Increases student focus
• Leads to better organisation of knowledge than reading or revising alone (doing the assessment has a benefit as well as preparing for it)
• Improves metacognition by providing feedback on knowns and unknowns
• Improves transfer of knowledge to new contexts
• Gives feedback to teachers
• Encourages students to study

At Uckfield College we build our assessments on four pillars and staff have been trained to develop high quality assessment practice using these four pillars: