Why you should read: Making Good Progress by Daisy Christodoulou

Each type of assessment has different implications for our sense of achievement, progress and standards, and the validity and reliability of the data that we can capture. What is it about? Making Good Progress is an in depth exploration of the two main purposes of assessment: Formative assessment should give us information about how students can make further progress, ‘identifying consequences’ so that teachers and students can adjust to learn even more Summative assessment should allow us to make meaningful comparisons between a student’s and a larger cohort’s performance against a set of standards. It’s about sampling a knowledge domain without assessment itself becoming the primary focus. Christodoulou explores the information that assessments of different kinds give us. She discusses the nature of formative and summative assessment and, with references to the findings from cognitive psychology, argues that the types of assessment we use for the two purposes a