Compact guide – Students with cognition and learning needs: The role of language in on-the-spot formative assessment

DR AMELIA ROBERTS, HEAD OF PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT, UCL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, UK Setting the scene Black and Wiliam (cited in Wiliam and Leahy, 2024) highlight the importance of designing lessons that enable on-the-spot observation to build a rich and detailed understanding of students with cognition and learning needs (CLN), to enable scaffolding to meet students at the exact point of need. Activities that provide insight into students’ thinking enable the most accurate formative assessment. Through language observation, teachers can observe robustness of conceptual understanding, breadth of vocabulary, confidence and peer interaction. While this guide focuses on language observation in the classroom, students who are non-verbal will also benefit from formative assessment, and there are multiple ways to monitor their cognition and learning (Bornman et al., 2024). On-the-spot formative assessment example A few years ago, I filmed a short series of lessons