Tag: assessment planning

Ask a room of preservice teachers what comes after “learning intention” and “success criteria” in a lesson plan, and most will say “the activity.” Ask what comes after that, and the answer gets vaguer — a formative check, added somewhere near the end, almost as an afterthought.

That’s not really anyone’s fault. Backward design tells you assessment comes before activities. What it doesn’t spell out is that assessment is not one decision. It’s a chain of decisions, and each link depends on the one before it.

Skip a link, and the chain still looks fine from a distance. It’s only when you go to use the evidence — for reporting, for grouping, for next week’s planning — that you notice something’s missing. This is the first of three posts unpacking that chain, starting with the two links most planning conversations skip.

The Missing Link in Backward Design

In our post on backward design, Stage 2 — “determine acceptable evidence” — sounds like a single step. In practice, it’s five separate decisions, and they only work as a chain.

Get the content descriptor right, and the learning intention should follow. Get the learning intention right, and the success criteria should follow. From there, though, teachers routinely stall. The assessment strategy gets chosen on instinct, and the record-keeping device gets chosen even later — often on the walk to the photocopier, five minutes before the lesson starts.

That’s the gap this post is about. Not the first three links, which we’ve covered in detail already, but the two that come after — and the discipline of choosing them together, not separately.

A Quick Primer: For, As and Of Learning

Before you choose a strategy, it helps to know which purpose you’re actually serving. Lorna Earl’s framework names three: assessment for learning, assessment as learning, and assessment of learning (Earl, 2003).

Assessment for learning is diagnostic and formative. It’s evidence you, the teacher, use in the moment to adjust what happens next. Assessment as learning hands that job to the student — self-monitoring against criteria they understand well enough to apply themselves. Assessment of learning is summative. It’s the judgement that gets reported, once the learning is done.

We’ve explored the for/as/of distinction in more depth before, so treat this as the short version. What matters here is simpler: know which purpose you’re serving before you pick a strategy. A strategy built for one purpose rarely does justice to another.

This isn’t just conceptual housekeeping. AITSL Standard 5 — assess, provide feedback and report — assumes you can name which purpose each piece of evidence serves. When for, as and of learning blur together, so does your evidence trail.

Worked Example: Extending Year 5 HASS Into Record-Keeping

Take the Year 5 HASS example from our backward design post. The content descriptor is AC9HS5K03 — the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The learning intention: explain how colonial settlement affected Aboriginal Peoples’ lives, using specific evidence. The success criterion: describe at least two impacts, each supported by evidence from a source.

The assessment strategy was already chosen there — an exit ticket, collected before students leave the room. That’s assessment for learning: formative, immediate, used to shape tomorrow’s grouping. But an exit ticket from 25 students produces 25 individual pieces of evidence. Without a record-keeping device, all of it disappears the moment it’s read and set aside.

Why Skipping a Link Breaks the Chain

A checklist works here because the question is genuinely binary — did the student meet the criterion, or not yet. Use the same checklist for something that needs to capture reasoning quality, and you’ll end up with a tidy spreadsheet that tells you almost nothing useful.

Compare that same lesson if the goal had been reasoning quality instead of two impacts. An anecdotal record — a few sentences noting how a student justified their answer — would have captured what the checklist could not, at the cost of more of your time. Neither device is wrong. The mismatch is choosing one without asking what the evidence actually needs to show.

That’s the trap. Record-keeping devices aren’t interchangeable, and a device that suits one assessment strategy can quietly undermine another. The mismatch rarely shows up until report-writing season, when the evidence you kept turns out not to answer the question you’re being asked. We’ll get into exactly which device suits which strategy in the next post in this series.

For now, the discipline that matters is simpler: choose your record-keeping device at the same time as your assessment strategy — not afterwards, once the marking pile has already landed on your desk. The same logic applies to a summative performance of worth, where the stakes for getting the record right are even higher.