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APP ENGLISH INTRO
Hello, welcome to this introductory video on assessing pupil progress.
Assessing pupil progress is a series of descriptions relating to skill and ability level and it’s
part of the national curriculum. In essence so that students and teachers know where a
student is in their work, they can cross reference it with a set of descriptors that explain
skill and then if the teacher is satisfied that the students can achieve and demonstrate
that skill, the student is free to actually try and look to improve their work by hitting
higher descriptors.
Students do not write to the APP criteria. Students will write their work and then a
teacher will actually assess it, so for example, if we look here at the writing one, a student
may have demonstrated from level 3 here, or something from level 5 here and then something
from level 1, maybe in punctuation etc. and the teacher has a responsibility of balancing
all that out.
The AFs at the top here are assessment focuses or foci should I say, and they are basically
the areas that are being focused on.
Down the side we have the levels which are incremental, so level 1 down here is the lowest,
which relates to basic primary school level and level 8 here, bearing in mind that this
is for key stage 3, is roughly at the GCSE level. Now that’s not a hard and fast rule
because as we mentioned just a second ago, it’s all fluid. You might be doing level
8 work in one area but level 5 work in the other which might bring your work down to
a low 7/high 6 as the teacher sees fit.
In any piece of writing that you do at key stage 3, your teachers may well use this as
a reference but they may not. It’s not compulsory to use, it’s simply a guide. A lot of teachers
will actually go with their gut, rather than using the exact descriptors, although some
schools will use it more than others. Either way it’s hugely detailed and it really helps
with isolating where a student can and needs to improve. The basic principle behind this
is that if a student can demonstrate a skill at any section, then the teacher will then
be looking to see if they’ve hit the descriptor above, much in the same way that the GCSEs
are examined and assessed.
The teachers will give you an average as mentioned and our videos will cover every APP point
with examples and sometimes will cross reference them with the aim of allowing students to
understand what is needed to achieve a certain skill. At the lower level of these in levels
1, 2, 3, 4, then the descriptions will be quite sparse and basic because the skill being
asked for is quite sparse and basic but as we go through to level 8 sometimes we’ll
have whole videos just on one section, and hopefully we’ll cover all of them that way.
Each subject is broken down into different key areas which we’ll be focusing on, so
for English we’re looking at reading, writing, speaking, listening and as mentioned, the
headings refer to the assessment focus and the levels are incremental. The important
thing to note in the videos is when I mention that we are now 1.2 or 1.3 or 4.2, 4.3, the
.2 and the .3 are not incremental, they’re simply there for reference in the national
curriculum APP it’s shown, they just use bullet points, so that does not mean that
doing this is of any higher value than doing this, I am just putting 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 so you
can easily reference the items as they go down the page. If you do want to find these
documents they are available on the National Strategies website and the Government website,
so hopefully you can have a read through it yourself but some of the language might get
– and some of the differentiation between the criteria might become a little muddled
so hopefully in making this series of videos it allows you to follow and progress.
Really useful for students, really useful for parents and in time we’ll be translating
this into other languages as well so that the students who probably need to know this
stuff most, especially with the lower end, for home English as second language will be
able to follow and progress just as readily as everyone else.
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