If we were building a new school, we wouldn’t ’t start without laying firm foundations. In the same way, we can ’t develop great assessment practice without a strong base knowledge of the key theory around assessment.

We have distilled this theory down into the four pillars of great assessment: purpose, validity, reliability and value. The Four Pillars of Assessment resource guide will provide you with a strong understanding of what underpins each pillar and how it supports great assessment. Practical support to apply the principles of great assessment are available through our training courses.

1. Purpose

The importance of purpose

We live in an information age, at a time when the quantity of information in our lives often outweighs the quality of it.

Assessments used to generate information on which decisions are made about student learning need to provide high-quality information fit for the purposes intended. There are dozens of reasons why you might assess pupils, and the ideal type of assessment is different depending on the purpose. However, it is not uncommon to lose sight of the function of assessment.

Assessment can also become all things to all people, where information collected for one purpose is also used as a measure of something entirely different. For example:

An end-of-year assessment designed to measure attainment in mathematics, but which tests only certain components of mathematics (multiplication, division and place values, for instance), cannot be used to draw conclusions about maths attainment in general (the intended purpose), only the components it includes. Matters are complicated when questions in the assessment contain overly complex wording. The assessment now requires sufficient reading skill to access the maths at the heart of the assessment, thereby disadvantaging weaker readers.

Until you are clear about exactly what your different purposes are, you won ’t be able to use the right assessments.