The Purpose of Assessment in Humanities:

Assessment in Humanities is used to check understanding and drive learning forward. It plays a crucial role in helping teachers to gain a detailed knowledge of the learning needs of our young people and this, in turn, enables Humanities staff to tailor our provision so that all students are all able to make progress towards the outcomes they deserve. Assessment also plays a valuable role in helping students to develop the ability to monitor their own learning and progress. Through assessing their own work, or that of their peers, our young people have the opportunity to develop an understanding of what success looks like in Humanities subjects.

Marking and Feedback:

Students complete 6 pieces of work that are marked thoroughly by their teachers. For these pieces of work teachers are expected to provide clear instructions, or ‘next steps’ that are designed to help students understand how to improve. After students receive the feedback they are expected to complete a response task to demonstrate that they have understood the feedback they have been given. These response tasks are often highly personalised and reflect the needs of the individual student. However, where an assessment task has identified a ‘class need’ (a widely held misconception or a skill that requires more thorough teaching) the teacher may choose to do a whole class feedback activity.

One per term for RS, 10 pieces 

Students will also complete at least four pieces of work that will be self or peer assessed. Throughout this process the class teacher is expected to provide very clear success criteria to enable students to mark the work of others and monitor their own learning and progress. Self/ peer assessment may also be used prior to teacher marking so that feedback takes the form of a dialogue between the student and teacher. 

Marking of Literacy:

In Humanities we appreciate that we play a vital role in developing the reading, writing and speaking skills of the students we teach. Therefore when we mark assessed pieces of work we use the same criteria as the English department for giving feedback on spelling, punctuation and grammar. We also look to highlight points in a student’s work where their written expression of their ideas needs rethinking. 

In addition to this we also recognise that disciplinary literacy sits at the heart of everything we do as a department. Therefore feedback is often focused  on how to develop the language of explanation and analysis that brings success in Humanities subjects. This might take the form of written feedback in marked pieces of work but verbal feedback will also be given during class discussion/ group modelling sessions.