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 with a couple of mainstream secondary schools. In one clip, students with special educational needs (SEND) are seen in a paired activity in a science lesson. In this clip, we hear:
Student 1: What is a pH scale?
Student 2: Is it that thing with colours that goes up to 14?
Student 1: No. It is to measure [struggles to sound out words ‘alkalinity’ and ‘acidity’] alkalnity and asitty.
This interaction offers insight into on-the-spot formative assessment. For Student 2, we know that there is an understanding of what a pH scale looks like, but that its function is less clear. This might feed into the next lesson plan, perhaps pre-teaching core vocabulary and using a cloze procedure (a sentence with words missing) to support understanding of the usage and context of pH scales.
For Student 1, there was no recognition that Student 2’s answer related to the image of the scale. Student 1 has mixed decoding skills. ‘What’, ‘scale’ and ‘measure’ are all read correctly, showing embedding of irregular or complex grapheme–phoneme correspondence. However, the new words ‘alkalinity’ and ‘acidity’ are neither decoded nor recognised. The next lesson plan might support word decoding skills with a practical activity testing different acidities, matching results to the scale and recording this in a workbook.
Action points for teachers
Language-rich activities in the classroom
In our rapid evidence review (Antalek et al., 2025a), we identified that ‘peer-mediated instruction (PMI) was another approach shown to benefit children and young people with diverse needs’ (p. 9).
Group-work for mixed-ability classrooms often requires practice of the types of skills required, such as turn-taking and building on ideas (Kutnick and Blatchford, 2014 (primary focus); Blatchford et al., 2003 (secondary focus)). Practising small activities, such as generating vocabulary associated with a topic, may be a good starting point to assess the amount of support needed for group-work soft skills, as well as listening to which words are being generated and how they are being used. Matching up words with definitions, responding to ‘open questions’ and converting information from one form into another (e.g. map-reading into a tourist brochure) can all be good peer tasks for formative observation.
Any activity requiring problem solving, critical thinking and peer dialogue enables teachers to ‘hear’ how students are thinking and evaluate which concepts are secure.
Pre-teaching vocabulary, providing a short film to view at home to enable deeper understanding prior to a lesson, and structuring curriculum topics around special interests may enable students with CLN to access activities with increased confidence.
TA role in formative assessment
Teachers may specify particular areas of focus for a TA to assess via observation, such as embedded use of technical language or correct choice between two mathematical operations. The TA knowledge of students and effective observation of exactly which learning is secure or not can feed into subsequent lesson planning.
Top tips
- How does problem solving happen in your school? Structures such as Lesson Study (Seleznyov et al., 2020) offer a structured way in which to examine the learning of students in specific classrooms and to ‘problem-solve’ with other teachers.
- Share examples of great activities that have elicited rich student conversations, including those students with CLN. Share within school, but also more widely across school communities.
- Encourage TAs to talk about what they are observing in the classroom. Enable time for TAs to share insights and feedback with teachers and school leaders.
Want to know more?
- The Department for Education’s report on ‘Identifying and supporting children and young people with cognition and learning needs’ (Antalek et al., 2025b) has specific evidence-based strategies to identify and support students with CLN in the classroom (see references).
- Teaching assistants can play a vital role in supporting and designing tasks to encourage peer collaboration in mixed-attainment groupings. TAs’ observation and feedback on students’ specific use of language and vocabulary can be invaluable information to teachers in planning the next lesson. This report from the Education Endowment Foundation gives more information: educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/teaching-assistants
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