Fettes College Guangzhou believes that the quality and nature of assessment has a major impact on students’ performance and progress. Ongoing assessment is both formative and summative, focusing on achievement and celebrating progress, while also addressing any misconceptions or misunderstandings, enabling students to become reflective learners who understand the valuable role feedback can have in their learning and acquisition of skills.

Staff are skilled in using assessment to support individual learning and in planning next steps in consultation with the students. Pupils and staff are fully involved in planning, reflecting upon and evaluating their own learning. Feedback is dynamic, and students are encouraged to correct their work in light of it, enter a dialogue with their teachers and their tutor around their feedback and construct targets for future improvement. The tutor is pivotal in helping students see how feedback can be applied to support development across subject areas.

Teachers and students at Fettes College Guangzhou are fully committed to, and skilled in, assessment for learning (AfL). Formative Assessment strategies give students opportunities to participate in a dialogue about their learning that allows them to identify their next steps.

Assessment Principles and Criteria

In Middle School, teachers make decisions about student achievement using their professional judgment, guided by MYP criteria. Teachers adopt the “criterion-related” approach to assess. The school encourages teachers to set a variety of assessment tasks to assess students authentic understanding performance. Teachers identify students’ achievement levels against established assessment criteria. Middle School assessment uses the “best-fit” approach in which teachers work together to establish common standards against which they evaluate each student’s achievement holistically.

FCG Middle School assessment requires teachers to assess the prescribed MYP Subject-group Objectives using the assessment criteria for each subject group in each year. Grade 6 uses the criteria of MYP Year1; the first term of Grade 7 uses the criteria of MYP Year1, and the 2^nd term of Grade 7 uses the criteria of MYP Year 3; Grade 8 uses the criteria of MYP Year 3. In order to provide students with opportunities to achieve at the highest level, MYP teachers develop rigorous tasks that embrace a variety of assessment strategies.

Teachers are well placed to assess the work of their MYP students; this assessment model supports the professional judgment of teachers in deciding the achievement levels of individual students.Assessment in MS should distinguish between summative assessment and formative processes. Teachers s hould take the most accurate demonstration of student performance as grading reference, rather than mechanically and uncritically averaging achievement levels over given reporting periods. Teachers should asses s student understanding at the end of a course, based on the whole course and not individual components of it.

The aim of assessment is to support and encourage student learning. We places an emphasis on assessment process which involves the gathering and analysis of information about student performance and that provide timely feedback to students on their performance. The assessment recognizes the importance of assessing not only the products, but also the process, of learning.

Multi-modal forms of homework are encouraged to use to train students in various learning methods and skills.

Assessment Types in Middle School

Diagnostic assessments

Before creating the instruction, it’s necessary to know for what kind of students you’re creating the instruction for. Our goal is to get to know the student’s strengths, weaknesses and the prior skills and knowledge the posses before taking the instruction. Based on the data we’ve collected, teachers can plan targeted instruction.

Formative assessments

Formative assessment is used in developing instruction. The goal is to monitor student learning to provide feedback. It helps identifying the gaps in the instruction. Based on the feedback teachers will know what to focus on for further expansion for the instruction. Teachers are required to record at least one assessment data (formative or summative) on Managebac each week.

Assessment in Middle School encourages teachers to monitor students’ developing understanding and abilities throughout the programme. Through effective formative assessment, teachers gather, analyse, interpret and use a variety of evidence to improve student learning and to help students to achieve their potential. Student peer and self-assessment can be important elements of formative assessment plans.

Teachers should set differentiated class task and homework for individual students. All tasks should be marked, and feedbacked with next step. At least once a week the results should be stored on ManageBac.

Subject teachers should guide students to keep pieces of their classwork or homework into a folder as the evidence in their student portfolio. Teachers should also give feedback for the portfolio.

 Before each summative assessment happen in the unit, there should be a formative assessment assessed by the same criteria as the summative assessment.

Summative assessments.

Summative assessment is aimed at assessing the extent to which the most important outcomes at the end of the instruction have been reached. School summative assessment is part of every MYP unit. Summative assessments are designed to provide evidence for evaluating student achievement using required MYP subject-group- specific assessment criteria.

Unit assessments in Middle School are integral to the learning process and are aligned with subject-group objectives. Assessments gather information from a variety of perspectives, using a range of tasks according to the needs of the subject and the nature of the knowledge, skills and understanding being assessed. Assessments should reflect the development of the students within the subject and provide evidence of student understanding through authentic performance (not simply the recall of factual knowledge).

Teachers should set one summative assessment with task clarification for each unit on Managebac. Subject teachers do the summative assessment grading standardization and moderation.

Achievement levels

FCG Middle School follows the achievement levels set by IB MYP. Each criterion is divided into various achievement levels (numerical values) that appear in bands, and each band contains general, qualitative value statements called level descriptors. The levels 1 and 2 appear as the first band, levels 3 and 4 as the second band, and so on. Level 0 is available for work that is not described by the band descriptor for levels 1 and 2. All criteria have four bands and a maximum of eight achievement levels. All MYP subject groups have four assessment criteria divided into four bands, each of which represents two achievement levels. MYP criteria are equally weighted.

The level descriptors for each band describe a range of student performance in the various strands of each objective. At the lowest levels, student achievement in each of the strands will be minimal. As the numerical levels increase, the level descriptors describe greater achievement levels in each of the strands.

To calculate the sum of the standard achievement levels of each student, it is necessary to add up the final achievement levels obtained by the student in the subject group according to all the assessment criteria.

Building shared understanding of MYP criteria

With reference to the published MYP assessment criteria, the descriptors of the various achievement levels and the qualitative value statements within each descriptor, teachers need to meet in subject teams to:

• identify individual similarities and differences in their understanding of the statements, using student work to provoke and promote discussion

• consult reference materials, such as IB-published  teacher support materials and workshop materials

• agree on working definitions of the various statements as they apply to their situations.

• For example, teachers of an MYP subject would need to agree, in the context of a particular assessment task, on the meaning of qualitative statements found within a strand of a particular criterion by discussing their expectations and using examples of student work to exemplify various achievement levels.

Internal standardization

Where more than one teacher is teaching the same subject group, the process of internal standardization must take place before final achievement levels are awarded. Internal standardization of assessment is also required for the community project. The process involves teachers meeting to come to a common understanding on the criteria and achievement levels and how they are applied. In so doing, teachers increase the reliability of their judgments. Standardization throughout the school year promotes consistency and builds common understandings about student achievement with respect to MYP objectives.

Determining achievement levels

At the end of a period of learning, teachers must make judgments on their students’ achievement levels in each subject-group criterion. To determine these achievement levels, teachers must gather sufficient evidence of achievement from summative assessments. Teachers need to ensure that this evidence comes from the performance of the student over the duration of the units taught.

A carefully constructed assessment task on an individual unit may provide evidence of achievement in all strands of a criterion or criteria.

When applying the assessment criteria to student performance, the teacher should determine whether the first descriptor describes the performance. If the student work exceeds the expectations of the first descriptor, the teacher should determine whether it is described by the second descriptor. This should continue until the teacher arrives at a descriptor that does not describe the student work; the work will then be described by the previous descriptor. In certain cases, it may appear that the student has not fulfilled all of the descriptors in a lower band but has fulfilled some in a higher band. In those cases, teachers must use their professional judgment in determining the descriptor that best fits the student’s performance.

The descriptors, when taken together, describe a broad range of student achievement from the lowest to the highest levels. Each descriptor represents a narrower range of student achievement. Teachers must use their professional judgment to determine whether the student work is at the lower or the higher end of the descriptor, and award the lower or higher numerical level accordingly. Some other factors may also influence the teacher’s decision on an achievement level, including the following.

• Student support—students will experience varying levels of support in their units, since peer- conferencing, formative assessment with feedback from the teacher, editing and correcting are all essential learning tools. Teachers should be mindful that achievement levels accurately reflect what students can do.

• Group work—teachers need to document carefully the input of individuals working in a group situation so that the achievement levels for individual students can be determined.

In these ways, at the end of a period of learning, evidence of student learning, gathered from a range of learning experiences in each of the objectives, can be matched to the appropriate assessment criteria to determine the student’s achievement level. Summative assessments data are the main reference to determin the student’s achievement level.

A whole academic year is devided into two terms. By Mid-term, teachers are required to fill in the Mid-term orders on the relavant platform based on the summative assessments data. By the end of the term, teachers are required to fill in the End-term reports on the relavant platform based on the summative assessment data in the whole term with comments from each subject teacher.

Reasonable adjustments

Students with learning support requirements may require reasonable adjustments to access the MYP curriculum framework, including internal and external assessments. A reasonable adjustment is an action taken to remove or decrease a disadvantage faced by students with learning support requirements. A reasonable adjustment could be unique to a specific student and may include changes in the presentation of the test or method of response. Where reasonable adjustments involve changes to specific aspects or specific criteria of the assessment, the overall learning outcome must remain the same. 

For teachers, to summarize:

• We believe in assessment for learning.

• We adopt the “criterion-related” approach to assess.Teachers make decisions about student achievement using their professional judgment, guided by MYP criteria.

• Teachers are required to record at least one assessment data (formative or summative) on Managebac each week.

• Teachers should set differentiated class task and homework for individual students. All tasks should be marked, and feedbacked with next step.

• Each unit, the summative assessments are designed to provide evidence for evaluating student achievement using required MYP subject-group- specific assessment criteria.

• To determine the final achievement level, teachers should take summative assessments data as the main reference. Teachers must use their professional judgment in determining the descriptor that best fits the student’s performance.

• To calculate the sum of the standard achievement levels of each student, it is necessary to add up the final achievement levels obtained by the student in the subject group according to all the assessment criteria.

Work Cited

Middle Years Programme MYP: From principles into practice. International Baccalaureate Organization.September 2014.