For most teachers, there is a routine and a set of expectations around the testing of students’ literacy and numeracy – but there are a lot of unresolved questions when it comes to oracy assessment. At the heart of this are three challenges. 

Reliability: A reliable assessment is one that consistently delivers the same result, regardless of who marks it. It is important for fairness, and for our ability to trust in an assessment and use it to make decisions.

Oracy assessments, like essays and other “long answer” questions, tend to be open, with many possible “right” answers (compared to multiple-choice questions, for example). These sorts of assessments tend to have lower reliability scores, and this is particularly important if the assessment is finely graded and/or to be used in a high-stakes

Validity: What are we assessing exactly? Validity is the extent to which an assessment lets you draw sensible conclusions or make decisions about the thing you think you’re measuring. For example, a Monday morning spelling test is a great test of whether children know the words they took home on Friday! It is a worse test of how many words the children know how to spell, in general, and even worse if used as the only test of a child’s literacy – it leaves so many other aspects of literacy untested.

In the context of oracy, then, validity poses a challenge. There’s a wide range of competencies and contexts that are relevant to our judgement of a student’s oracy skills. A student who thrives in a small group discussion might not thrive on stage in front of a large audience. We need to choose our assessments carefully and draw conclusions cautiously. 

Usability: Assessments have to work in the real world. Real students need to take the test, administered by real teachers, in real schools. For oracy, this can present a challenge, whether that is finding a quiet space in a busy school, working out how to fairly assess a group task, or how to record and store students’ responses.

Overcoming challenges

In a way, the absence of top-down, national testing for oracy presents teachers with an opportunity. Each school can determine for themselves whether they need to assess students’ oracy, and if so, which dimensions they choose to prioritise and when.

The purpose of these assessments is a formative one. School-based oracy assessments are seeking to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses with a view to informing teaching and learning and sharing information across the staff body.

As a result, these assessments ought to be designed to inform teachers’ professional judgement – not to replace it. The reliability of the assessment will depend upon the extent to which you have established a shared language for discussing oracy and “what good sounds like” in your school.

Design your own

In designing your own oracy assessment, you will need to consider the following four things:

The assessment object: What are you measuring? The more specific you can be about the aspect of oracy you are trying to assess, the easier it will be. For example, are you more interested in exploratory or presentational modes? Are there specific elements you want to focus on in this assessment? Are there groupings or protocols that are common across subject areas in your school?

The assessment task: What task would you like to assess? You will need to find a task that lets students demonstrate the competencies you identified as important to assess – which is also something that it is practical for you to assess in your context. Often, we default to significant one-off events (e.g. a big presentation), but it can be easier and more useful to assess students’ everyday talk (e.g. trio discussions).

Success criteria: What does it look like to do this task well? Use a blend of description and modelling when discussing this with students and other teachers, to ensure everyone has a shared understanding. There are some aspects of oracy that are very easy to describe (e.g. the pace and volume of the speaker), and others that are more challenging (e.g. most of the cognitive strand).

As a result, it can be easy to fall into a trap when assessing, of over-focusing on these easier-to-describe areas. To avoid this, make as much use of video as you can – short clips filmed on a tablet can go a long way to enriching teachers’ shared understanding of oracy.

Reporting: Keep it simple! This may be as light-touch as verbal feedback to students, or notes kept by and for one teacher. You may choose to RAG-rate students or whole classes against the oracy features that you are looking out for. On the other end of the spectrum, you may choose (hopefully infrequently) to film students performing their oracy task, allowing for any outcomes to be moderated and/or stored as evidence of learning.