Assessment and feedback in an online context: Checking understanding

What's the idea? Moving from the classroom to online learning presents new challenges, including around assessment and feedback. Many of the principles of good feedback and assessment can still apply to the online environment, they just need to be reframed to fit this new context. Regardless of the setting, there are some key considerations around assessments that teachers need to bear in mind. For example, first and foremost, good assessment practice is purposeful. We need to target precisely the ‘what’, i.e. what we want to assess and the why, i.e. for what purpose we want to assess it. In the current context, for example, this might be to check understanding to inform what we do next as teachers, to support pupils’ learning by encouraging them to recall information and thereby strengthen its memory, or to provide feedback to pupils so they can redraft and improve their work. This Compact Guide focuses particularly on checking pupils’ understanding. What does the researc