Developing assessment

Key stage 1

Practical ways to assess progress

When assessing children’s progress in history, try to avoid making the process too complicated. Below are some practical ideas that can be adapted for use in lessons.

• Discuss a picture. ‘How can we tell this picture is showing us life in the past and not nowadays?’ ‘What can we tell about life in the past from this picture?’ ‘What part of the story is this picture showing? What happened just before or after?’
• Compare pictures from the past and present, looking at the main differences.
• Retell a story orally or by sequencing pictures.
• Sort pictures or objects into old and new or then and now with pupils explaining orally how they know or listing a few points on a divided sheet, such as Old Bear/New Bear: ‘Old Bear has only got one ear left, bits are coming off him, he is worn.’
• Matching pictures to people or places, for example ‘what would the lady in this picture have used to…?’
• Make lists.
• Draw an object into a picture where it has been blanked out.
• Annotate a picture.
• Write a caption.
• Label a timeline.
• Write a descriptive account of an event.
• Speech bubbles. This is demonstrated very effectively by the example above from New Milton Infant School, where Shirley Schlesinger was trying to tease out the issue of motivation. “Why did Guy Fawkes take the actions he did?”

Speech bubbles can be used to explain motivation in a story

• Spot the anachronism, for example a computer in a Victorian classroom scene.

It would not take very long to put the responses from children in a class into some sort of hierarchy of understanding to use as part of an evidence base for arriving at judgements about historical understanding.

Some more ideas are given below.

Assessing sense of sequence and chronology

• Sequence pictures of incidents in a story in a correct chronological order.
• Re-tell the story from pictures.
• Make sets of pictures or objects, for example old and new, then and now, used by X in the story or not, modern/old equivalents.
• Label drawings of an old object.
• Write a caption to accompany a mystery object.

Using pictures to stimulate responses

• Washday. What is happening in this picture? What does it tell us about life in the past?
• Famous person. What part of the story of a famous person’s life is shown in this picture? What happened just before and after?
• Going to the seaside. What does this picture tell about seaside holidays in the past? What three items can you see in the seaside picture of 100 years ago that would not be around today?

Assessing understanding of cause and consequence

If drawings are used, they must show period-specific detail. Beware of low-level answers that appear to use the right words even though the drawings are totally anachronistic, for example buildings look just like houses today.

A good example is looking at the Great Fire of London. Ask the children to give as many reasons as they can why the Great Fire spread so quickly. Get them to draw a picture to show people trying to put out the fire. Make them label it as a way to explain what they mean.

A possible mark scheme is given below.

• Low. Covers only one simple reason such as the houses were made of wood or they were close together.
• Medium. Provides more than one reason. Focuses mainly on the fact that houses were made of wood and the closeness of the buildings. Give more credit if the children also refer to the narrowness of the streets and thatch (straw) roofs.
• High. Here pupils go beyond the simple factors that might lead to fire at any time and try to see that it was poor fire fighting that also allowed the fire to spread so quickly. So look for a full range of reasons (at least three), even if listed. These must include: wooden buildings, narrow streets and poor fire-fighting methods.
• Best answers. Will try to give some shape to the explanation, giving the main reason why plus another important reason.