By Conor Maxwell
Overview
The Classroom-Based Assessment (CBAs) are designed to take place over three weeks throughout the school year for second and third years, at designated times, with one CBA to be completed each year for each subject studied. The conclusion of the Christmas Break usually means the commencement of CBAs for students!
This blog post will give you some tips to set your students (and you!!) up for success while they are completing them.
Prior Exposure to Similar Tasks
Classroom-Based Assessments provide students with opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and skills in a way that would not be possible in a formal examination.
The assessments associated with CBAs cover a range of activities including oral tasks, written work of different types, practical or designing and making tasks, artistic performances, scientific experiments, projects, or other suitable tasks depending on the subject in question.
Whatever task is to be completed in your subject it is advisable that the skill associated with the CBA is developed beforehand. For example, the first Maths CBA that students complete in the second year is a problem-solving task. This doesn’t mean that this should be their first time engaging with the problem-solving cycle. This problem-solving skill needs to be worked on, and developed, long in advance of the CBA.
Now, this does not mean giving “mock CBAs’. It means giving students a chance to practice skills they are going to need as they move through their studies.
Have a discussion with your department colleagues about how this skill development can be built into your subject planning and give time to its development. Your students will see the benefit of it.
What does good work look like?
I upload exemplars provided by both the NCCA and my own students. Throughout their first and second year, we ensure to give time to them to examine these exemplars.
It doesn’t have to be a significant amount of time, but it allows them to develop their evaluative skills and for them to become familiar with the idea of the Features of Quality.
Typically, we read through the Features of Quality together before examining a small extract from one of the exemplars.
Schedules and Deadlines
Three weeks is a significant amount for students to work on one piece of work.
At this time, they need explicit instruction and clear guidelines as to when they need their work done. I found it useful to have rough deadlines in place and available to them in the subject notebook. They could check in with these to assess their own progress and it made the final few days a lot easier on all of us when the final deadline was approaching.
Feedback
Feedback on performance is undoubted, one of the single most powerful influences on student achievement. It is highly important that as students move through the completion of their CBA that effective feedback is provided to move their progress forward. My biggest takeaway from this process? Use audio feedback.
Submission and Grading
Now for the tips that are going to make your life as a teacher easier! I can’t advocate enough for using the assignments feature on Teams to allow students to upload their work.
It centralizes everything for the teacher, meaning quick access to all of the CBAs, but it also makes corrections so much easier. To make your life easier, keep these things in mind:
Rubrics: Copy and paste the features of quality from the NCCA into the designated rubric section. This makes your corrections so much easier because you just have to select what descriptor each criterion of the CBA will get, before giving an overall grade.
You can find out how to do this in the video below.
