Art, craft & design assessment advice
Art assessment should never be a judgement passed from teacher to pupil, it should be positive guidance for improvement. Art assessment should promote and improve learning and build confidence and motivation. Too often, especially in Secondary education, assessment is wieldy, onerous, and negative. It focusses on what pupils cannot do, and what they must do to improve, instead of emphasising what pupils can do, what they have done well, and how they might make it even better.
When it comes to inspection, inspectors are looking to see that a school’s assessment system supports the pupils’ journeys through the curriculum. Inspectors do not need to see quantities of data, spreadsheets, graphs and charts on how children are performing. What inspectors do want to see is the assessment information your school uses, in the format that you find works best, to help you know how well your pupils are doing at the point they are at in your curriculum. And then, crucially, what you do with that information to support better pupil achievement.
National Director of Education Sean Harford
How do you gather assessment information to identify how well your pupils are doing in art and design? Then what do you do with it?
You would know them as circle time, and art students know them as crits. Either way, a group discussion about our art is the most effective way I have found to s]assess art. A group discussion gives us multiple perspectives on our work. A group discussion allows pupils to visually see their work in relation to other pupils. This could be a good or a bad thing, (they usually see it as bad), so the discussion has to alter misconceptions. A teacher should steer the conversations towards building pupil confidence, whilst identifying areas for future development. What went well and even better if.
There are no judgments in art, no grades, no written comments, ticks, or crosses because there are no right or wrong answers. There are no national standards in art, no mandatory levels or essential knowledge, and no non-negotiables. Put your purple pens in the drawer. Throw your verbal feedback stamps in the bin. You don’t need them. We do not measure attainment in art. We do not compare ourselves to others. There is no best and worst art.
Despite this, it is important to know that assessment in art isn’t a free for all. It isn’t patting everyone on the back and telling them they are brilliant. What we do have in art is our own personal progression. We take starting points, then measure progress from them toward our agreed objectives and endpoints.
I’ve created ten assessment points you should consider when assessing art and design:
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Know the purpose of your assessment
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Identify your pupil’s starting points
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Assess a broad range of artistic abilities over time, linked to content
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Identify Endpoints
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Feedback should move the learning forward
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Feedback should motivate
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Assessment should be inclusive
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Some forms of assessment are more visible than others
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Your assessments should be reliable, replicable, and accurate
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Feedback should be efficient & effective
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1. Know the purpose of your assessment
The first, and probably most important, purpose of assessment is as a formative tool to support teaching and learning in the classroom. Examples of this in art might be to gather information about existing technical ability in a particular medium before you begin an activity or to identify your pupil’s ability to find, read and extract information from research text.
You must know what you want your pupils to be able to do and they have to know what you want from them. The clearer this is, the more effectively it is communicated, and the more effective, and easier, your assessments will be.
The second purpose of assessment is a summative tool for reporting back to the school and to relative stakeholders. In each case, the purpose of the assessment dictates its appearance and form. Summarising attainment in art as a grade or number in a SIMS spreadsheet is a very reductive form of reporting that labels students. I would hope that modern technology can be used to much greater effect to make meaningful statements about pupil performance in the subject.
2. Identify your pupil's starting points
You can’t measure progress until you know your student’s general ability in the areas of my Pyramid Progression: Skills, Knowledge & Creativity. I developed a simple exercise to do this that takes about an hour to do and I would do it at the beginning of each year.
Skills assessment for Key Stage 3 pupils; Traditionally, an observational drawing task is undertaken at the start of Year 7. You can set a still-life arrangement on a table or provide an interesting, stimulating object to draw and produce a drawing within 30 minutes, to get a good understanding of basic skills. What you are seeing here are your pupils' Fine Motor Skills ability and their basic draughtsmanship. You aren't getting an understanding of their skills in any other areas of art, including sculpture and Gross Motor Skills, which is often why boys don't excel in art - the subject isn't geared towards their abilities, (but that's another topic!).
Creativity assessment for Key Stage 3: I've developed a variation on a Torrance test for creativity. You can measure a pupil's creative potential by giving them an outline of a simple shape, such as a kidney bean or circle, then asking them to produce the most imaginative, original picture they can think of, that includes background. Emphasise the need for originality and imagination. This takes about 20 minutes maximum.
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Alternatively, you can provide a small object such as a key, bottle top or screw, and ask them to make a detailed observational drawing of it. Next, transform the drawing of the object into an original, imaginative picture. This combines both of the exercises above.
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That is my baseline assessment complete! Note, you can simply look at pupils' sketchbooks or folders from the previous year if it's easier. You may also have transitionary data and summative reports from previous years which can all be used to assess the starting points across all three areas. Some teachers tell me they do a portrait project each year to assess pupils' starting points, but all this does is tell you how good they are at drawing faces. It doesn't give you other essential information about literacy or creativity.
Measuring the Results: Next, I get everyone into a circle or group, and we celebrate and enjoy our pictures, commenting on what is most interesting and successful. As the teacher, I am looking for distinct assessment areas here. I can choose to share this information with the class or not, but I want to measure; drawing ability in terms of the level of skill, attention to detail or successful transference of their idea and their level of original, imaginative thinking. I make judgements about their work to the three assessment strands of working towards, working at or greater depth, ‘where working at’ is the expected standard of drawing for their age and being able to describe an idea that few other people have thought of in the room. (Sometimes, we can draw the same idea in different ways!)
Reading Age: The only other information I will need now for my baseline assessment is their reading age described as working towards, working at or working at a greater depth. This gives me vital information about pupils' ability to engage with the literacy elements of my curriculum. Literacy is a key driver of attainment in art. Those with lower reading ages will struggle to achieve higher grades because they lack the ability to articulate their thoughts and opinions.
It will have taken about an hour to do the assessment and discuss/assess it in the group, but this now gives me three measurements of ability:
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1. Their general drawing ability is described as working towards, working at or working at a
greater depth.
2. Their level of creative imagination is described as working towards, working at or working
at a greater depth.
3. Their ability to access and describe their own and others’ artworks using verbal and
written communication.
This last measurement can be used to measure the two curriculum attainment areas of knowledge and evaluation that we have outlined above. What you should find from doing this is that some pupils are very skilful at drawing, but not so imaginative. Some are imaginative but not so skilful and some are literate and articulate but not imaginative or skilful. In our current art education climate, it is usually the skilful ones who receive the most recognition, rather than the budding art critic or most imaginative ones.
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