Assessment of Learning
Students are assessed informally during their leaning process in order to modify teaching and
learning to improve students’ achievements.
Assessment for Learning
*What is Assessment for Learning?
Assessment for learning (AfL) is a teaching approach that generates feedback that can be used
to improve students’ performance. Students become more involved in the learning process and,
from this, gain confidence in what they are expected to learn and to what standard. We as
teachers gain insights into a student’s level of understanding of a particular concept or topic,
which helps to inform how we support their progression.
We need to understand the meaning and method of giving purposeful feedback to optimize
learning. Feedback can be informal, such as the use of rubrics to help clarify and scaffold
learning and assessment objectives.
*Why use Assessment for Learning?
By following well-designed approaches to AfL, we can understand better how our student are
learning and use this to plan what we will do next with a class or individual students. We can
help our students to see what they are aiming for and to understand what they need to do to get
there. AfL makes learning visible; it helps students understand more accurately the nature of the
material they are learning and themselves as learners. The quality of interactions and feedback
between students and teachers becomes critical to the learning process.
We can use AfL to help our students focus on specific elements of their learning and to take
greater responsibility for how they might move forward. AfL creates a valuable connection
between assessment and learning activities as the clarification of objectives will have a direct
impact on how we advise teaching and learning strategies. AfL techniques can support students
in becoming more confident in what they are learning, reflective in how they are learning, more
likely to try out new approaches, and more likely to try out new approaches, and more engaged
in what they are being asked to learn.
*What are the challenges of incorporating AfL?
The use of AfL does not mean that we need to test students more frequently. It would be easy
to just increase the amount of summative assessment and use formatively as regular method of
helping us decide what to do next in our teaching. We can judge how much learning has taken
place through ways other than testing, including, above all, communication with our students in
a variety of ways and getting to know them better as individuals.
Where next ?