Assessment of work for Broad General Education phase
We assess reading in the Broad General Education in a number of ways:
- Close Reading (questions relating to increasingly complex fiction and non-fiction texts);
- Personal Reading (tracked by quizzes taken on the Accelerated Reader Programme)
- Critical Reading (extended critical reviews of poems, plays, novels, short stories and media texts studied as a class).
These assessment approaches prepare pupils for the demands Reading in the senior phase:
- Close Reading is assessed in Paper 1 (Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation)
- Critical Reading (writing critically about literary texts) is assessed in Paper 2
- Pupils who develop a regular Personal Reading habit reap the reward in their own writing (the Writing folio accounts for 30% of the award at Nat 5, Higher and Advanced Higher).
When we assess pupils’ writing skills in the Broad General Education, we take account of their work across different genre:
- broadly creative pieces (personal, reflective, short stories, poems, scripts and imagined responses to literature like letters and diary entries)
- broadly discursive (reports, newspaper articles, discursive essays and persuasive writing).
S1-S3 we look for progression in: length; complexity of ideas, structure, vocabulary and expression; and pupils’ ability to write with increasing independence. These types of writing (broadly creative and broadly discursive) are a crucial part of assessment in the Senior Phase (30% at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher).
Talking & Listening
Pupils’ talking & listening skills are developed and assessed through traditional activities such as:
- group discussion (with assigned roles of chairperson, scribe, reporter and timekeeper)
- solo talks (with time to research, prompt cards, slides and questions from the audience)
- analysis of spoken texts (akin to the Listening Assessments in National 4, 5 and Higher)
- whole class discussion and questioning (a crucial part of exploring literature and non-fiction and in preparing for writing)
- reading aloud (a part in a play for example).
- debating (with formal roles of proposition and opposition, challenges in the form of ‘points of information’ and judges deciding the outcome of the debate)
- hot seating and role play
- dragon’s den style competitions; circle games; poetry slams.
We provide both written and oral feedback on pupil work. Formal assessments (e.g. final copies of essays or notecards from a solo talk) will be attached to a cover sheet with feedback and kept in individual ‘good work folders’. Self and peer assessment approaches are also central to our work in this aspect of learning.