Formative and summative assessment in the Middle Years Programme
At Bali International School, we are authorised to deliver the International Baccalaureate’s Middle Years Programme. One of the distinguishing features of this programme is that it emphasises both skills and content. The content of subjects is not prescribed in detail and schools have the freedom to create their own curricula according to the needs of their community. The IBO does prescribe the skills that students must have by the time that they complete the MYP at the end of grade 10. Furthermore, BIS is authorised to offer the Diploma Programme for grade 11 and 12, for which the curriculum content is prescribed and external examinations are held at the end of grade 12.
In the MYP, each subject has prescribed aims and objectives and detailed assessment criteria. This applies to all schools all over the world that are authorised to offer the MYP. During the course of grade 10, samples of students’ work are sent to external moderators to ensure that we apply the assessment criteria according to international standards. Currently we have one trained moderator at BIS who receives samples for moderation from other schools.
This means that there are no external examinations in the MYP, however all of our assessment standards are moderated externally for grade 10.
The prescribed assessment criteria for each subject focus on content and on skills. This means that there is an emphasis on what students know and on what they can do with that knowledge and other knowledge that may be similar to that. In traditional assessment, the focus was on content only, examining what students knew. The IBO has recognised that our modern age is full of information that students have to be able to manipulate in order to be successful participants in a changing world. This is why skills have become so important in our age.
This equal emphasis on skills and content means that there has been a change in the kind of assessment that schools use to provide our students with the best learning opportunities. For many subjects in the MYP it is not possible to assess a student using all of the assessment criteria during an examination. Examinations, while still an important skill, form only a part of our assessment. Various other assessment tasks are used to provide us with a clear idea of what students know and what they can do.
The whole assessment process is comprised of two parts: formative assessment and summative assessment. Each type of assessment is important and serves a vital function in enabling our students to understand what progress they are making. Formative assessment is used during the course of a semester and helps the students identify areas that require improvement. This can be conducted formally and informally through means of feedback on draft work. Formative assessment also helps the teachers see which aspects of work, either skills or content, need to be revised or revisited in different ways.
Summative assessment is carried out at the end of a unit of work or a semester or academic year and should allow the students the opportunity to demonstrate what skills and content have been mastered. At BIS, we have a policy of continuous assessment, which means that the assessment process is ongoing and students regularly receive feedback about their content and skills progress.
While we recognise that the process of writing an examination is an important skill that must be perfected by the end of grade 12 for the diploma examinations, we also recognise that this is not the only skill that students need for grade 12. Just as we have designed the MYP curriculum content to prepare students for the rigor of the DP, so we prepare students for written examinations that require factual recall, manipulation of data and interpretation of sources. For the DP, students are expected to have mastered amongst others, the ability to read a wide variety of sources and to question these sources; the ability to conduct several pieces of independent research such as the Extended Essay, the Theory of Knowledge essay and the World Literature components of their Language A1 course and the ability to make a highly articulate oral presentation. Students are also expected to be able to produce creative work independently. These skills cannot be assessed under traditional examination conditions.
In conclusion, it is clear that while examinations are an important part of assessment, they certainly cannot cover all of our prescribed assessment needs and must be considered in the light of the overall education that we are providing for our students.
Werner Paetzold
Curriculum Coordinator
MYP Coordinator
