Assessment

Your children are ‘assessed’ on an ongoing basis in the course of their class work, every day. At the start of a lesson, the teacher shares the “learning intentions” with the children, and together they discuss what their teacher will be looking for to show that they have achieved, either fully or partly, the goals that were set.
Increasingly, the teacher will help the children to know what they need to do to improve in an area of their work, and will help them set targets to work towards this. Sharing learning intentions and setting targets helps young people to judge their own performance and eventually, to support each other’s learning through peer assessment.
As children move through the stages of school, the teacher will make judgements as to their readiness to move, say from Early level learning into First level, looking at how they perform in key experiences within a given curriculum area. On a more formal basis, Scottish Borders Council uses standardised tests at key stages of the school to look at the comparative performance of a child in relation to national “norms”. These tests give some indication of a child’s ability but are more useful for the purposes of statistical