Tracking student progress

If we do not know where children are starting from, how can we tell where they have reached? And if we do not know where they have reached, how can we tell the progress they have made? Regular assessment of individual progress is a cornerstone of ensuring teaching is constantly adapted to the changing needs of individual students.

Assessment at AWIS includes a mix of formative and summative assessment; each allows us to gather a range of important data that is used to continually improve the teaching and learning happening in school. Summative Assessment identifies the standard of attainment at a particular point in time e.g. end of unit, term or year. We use this information to track progress and report back to parents.

We firmly believe, however, that the overall purpose of assessment is to improve standards, not merely measure them. Formative Assessment is an integral part of our teaching and learning program and is an invaluable tool to promote effective further learning. This form of assessment is continual and enables us to set targets, whether class, group or individual, for further development to take place.

Reporting

Termly reports keep parents regularly appraised of the progress of their child, assessed against the National Curriculum of England. Our Parent-Teacher Conferences, give our parents the opportunity for one-on-one feedback and discussion with their child's teachers.

Benchmarking

We use periodic external assessments to benchmark our own internal data against the wider world. This ensures the attainment grades we issue are comparable to those issued by other international schools.

Each year, all our students in Years 2, 4 and 6 sit standardised Cognitive Abilities Tests (CAT4) administered by GL Assessment. These assessments will be conducted in school and will cover verbal, non-verbal, quantitative and spatial reasoning which will provide an objective perspective on potential student achievement. Results provide very specific benchmarking data on where each child is in their learning, and how this compares with their contemporaries, both within Qatar and the wider world. We use this data to validate our own assessment decisions, to ensure we are being accurate and objective when measuring student attainment and progress.

The school also participates in the TIMSS and PERLS benchmarking studies. These collect comparative worldwide data on student attainment, once every 4 years. An article on our excellent results in the most recent tests can be found here.