Assessment: How Can I Identify Greater Depth Children In Foundation Subjects?

Use Google to search for characteristics of greater depth pupils and you don't get much. What you do get is mainly focused on maths and English given that some criteria exist for these subjects. If you try to search for academic papers about greater depth pupils you get even fewer results.

You'll get some links to schools and organisations who've taken a stab at defining the characteristics of children working at greater depth (and usually quite a few links to my blog, despite my not having written specifically about this), but who's to say they're right?

To find research about the kind of pupils we might be thinking about, you have to go a bit old school with your search terms. Words like 'gifted' and 'talented' get you further. Even the UK's foremost organisation for such children uses the terminology of 'able' (NACE: National Association of Able Children in Education).

Identifying Greater Depth: Current Assessment Practice

Readers of this particular blog post will most likely have arrived here in their quest to devise assessment processes which can be used to identify children working at greater depth. Such people will probably be experiencing some discomfort around current assessment practises, particularly in foundation subjects and science, where the following are probably most common approaches:

• Gut feeling - when teachers feel like they 'just know' based on some aspect of a child's performance

• Top percentage - for example, where the top 10% of a class based on those meeting expectations (usually based on a list of objectives) are considered as the children working at greater depth

• Non-age-related expectations - where children are judged to be working beyond age-related expectations (rather than at a greater depth in the curriculum content set for their age group)

• Comparative judgement - comparative judgement can be used well, but if it is used to say some children are working at greater depth based on a comparison within their cohort, this can't be accurate as it wouldn't be comparable to other cohorts

• Completed ARE - a child who has securely demonstrated that they have learned everything required to be seen as age-related and who has demonstrated in some way to be working beyond this too, but there is no criteria to check this against

There are probably further approaches, many just a hybrid of the above, taking place in the UK's primary schools. And there is probably a very high requirement for teachers to report such data, without much guidance about how to do it.

Identifying Greater Depth: Specific Criteria

One approach that perhaps isn't seen as much in foundation subjects is the creation of further criteria which define what it looks like to be working at greater depth in each year group and each subject.

Surely having such guidelines would make identification of pupils working at greater depth much easier and a whole lot more robust? Perhaps it would, but the difficulty would be writing that criteria in the first place. How do you define what it looks like to be working at greater depth in history in year 3?

In the past such attempts at defining a higher standard of working have resulted in near-clone statements, differentiated by the change in adverb (e.g. sometimes, often, always) or by additional detail which is arguably abitrarily heirarchical and can often lead to very subjective use, for example, these three statements from the Teacher assessment frameworks at the end of key stage 2:

Working towards the expected standard: 'The pupil can write for a range of purposes'

Working at the expected standard: 'The pupil can write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences, selecting language that shows good awareness of the reader (e.g. the use of the first person in a diary; direct address in instructions and persuasive writing)'

Working at greater depth: 'The pupil can write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences, selecting the appropriate form and drawing independently on what they have read as models for their own writing (e.g. literary language, characterisation, structure)'

If you've been around long enough and can remember the APP grids where each level was broken down into three sub-categories (a, b and c) and then reporting broke this down even further with the use of pluses, then you'll agree that we don't want to go there with foundation subjects. We all knew the difference between related statements was minimal and that children were being assessed based on individual interpretation of those statements.

Not only would writing criteria to define what it looks like to be working at greater depth in each subject and in each year group be very onerous, there's a high chance it wouldn't be done well because it is difficult to define what working at greater depth looks like in each curriculum subject in each year group - you would most likely end up with abitrarily differentiated statements.

Identifying Greater Depth: Another (Better?) Way

Lets start with some general, non-subject specific characteristics of pupils working at greater depth. These from Todd Kettler's 'Critical Thinking Skills Among Elementary School Students: Comparing Identified Gifted and General Education Student Performance' act as a good starting point:

• Greater processing speed for both simple and complex tasks;

• More thorough problem solving using a wider array of strategies;

• Using more metacognitive strategies;

• Sustaining attention;

• Employing superior memory and more efficient retrieval processes;

• Advanced abstracting and generalising;

• Learning with less direct teaching.

Now, whilst each and every one of those could be argued, and perhaps no single child working at greater depth would possess all such characteristics, most of us would agree that they are recognisable traits in children considered as working at greater depth.

What if, alongside being acknowledge as having met all the requirements for working at the age related expectations in any given subject and year group, a child working at greater depth was identified as having some of the above characteristics (or similar)?

For example:

"Zakir demonstrates that he has met the objectives set in year 5 history, and as he has carried out lots of additonal learning using books and documentaries he also displays sustained attention and learning with less direct teaching. He had the time to do this additonal work as his processing speed allowed him to complete the set tasks quicker than other children."

I admit this is imperfect (because I think Kettler's list could potentially be longer - schools will probably want to define for themselves what they consider to be characteristics of children working at greater depth), but I think it is better than any of the five approaches mentioned earlier. The key difference is that here, the greater depth-ness is at least qualified and justifiable. The teacher has put their finger on exactly what it is that makes them think Zakir is working at greater depth whereas the other approaches are not at all based on defining why the child has been deemed to be working at greater depth.

If you'd like some bespoke help with developing the way you assess and identify pupils, including those working at greater depth, here's your 3-step plan:

1. Drop me an email

2. Have a phone call with me to talk about your school

3. We'll work together to empower you and your staff to enhance teaching and to enrich your pupils' lives