How to support learning progress with effective assessment

Learning as a continuum

Dr Hingston highlighted that assessment can easily become negative when it focuses primarily on what students cannot do. Assessments are often pitched to the middle band of a cohort, leaving high-achieving students feeling unchallenged and lower-achieving students feeling like they are struggling. True fairness and appropriateness in assessments unveil what students can do, identifying each learner’s current level of achievement and providing guidance for growth.

ACER frames learning as a continuum that unfolds over time. From this perspective, effective assessment supports learners to recognise their achievements, understand their progress, and identify clear next steps. Providing this information to both students and educators enables learning to be measured and supported over time.

Assessment plans

While curriculum-aligned testing remains important, good assessment practices go beyond just checking whether specific content has been learned. High-quality assessments examine students’ ability to apply knowledge, transfer understanding to new contexts, think critically and solve problems creatively. In this way, assessment becomes a source of information for action, not just grading.

An effective assessment plan should have space for both approaches, that is, testing concepts and measuring learning. Targeted classroom assessments provide immediate feedback on instructional effectiveness and student understanding of recent material, while broader, domain-level assessments reveal patterns of growth, strengths and gaps over time. Ms Singh emphasised that external assessments should not replace teacher observations and inferences, but reinforce them, contributing to a more holistic picture of learning.

A school’s assessment plan may also consider the different evidence requirements within the school, from leadership down through to students:

• School leadership looks at the overall cohort of the school and usually need a broader picture, such as academic performance trends across grade and subjects, achievement gaps, and benchmarking against national standards.
• Coordinators look at a subsection of the school, seeking subject-specific performance insights, common student misconceptions and classroom comparison within grades.
• Classroom teachers require something more micro-level, such as individual student progress, evidence-confirming classroom observations and suggestions for differentiating strategies.
• Students want an individual performance report, specifying the mastery checklist for subjects, personalised learning goals, and over time, a progress tracker showing improvement.

An effective plan can include everyday classroom assessments, observations and project-based tasks, as well as time for teachers to mark work, analyse data and moderate together so judgements are fair and consistent. Assessment should support teachers by helping them give timely feedback, plan differentiation and target interventions for individuals and groups. In the upper years, exams may also form part of the plan.

Performance vs. progress

Learning progress refers to the development and improvement a student demonstrates over time. It is a continuous process of building skills and deepening knowledge. While point-in-time assessments can provide valuable snapshots, not all measures are equally capable of capturing growth.

Dr Hingston cautioned against relying solely on raw scores, percentages or percentiles to infer progress. These classical statistical measures compare students against a cohort, rather than showing how much a student has learned, ‘They're not actually measuring learning progress. They're really trying to estimate it based on a student's performance against other students.’ For example, a student may remain at the 50th percentile year after year while still making substantial learning gains – progress that percentiles alone cannot reveal.

In contrast, assessments that measure progress use a common scale aligned to a learning continuum, allowing results from different tests to be compared meaningfully over time, showing how much a student has learned. Scale scores increase as students learn, even if their relative position within a cohort remains stable.

Evidence-informed decision-making

Evidence-informed decision-making means drawing a broad, balanced view of each child – looking at academic history, personal interest, cultural background, social dynamics and wellbeing. When we integrate multiple sources of information, we see learners more clearly and avoid narrow judgements. Using this data and observation as a guide helps us start from a place of equity and possibility, setting a tone where every child feels recognised and supported.

Assessment is most powerful when it is used thoughtfully, responsibly and with learning progression at its core. Data alone does not improve learning – educators need the skills and confidence to interpret and use it effectively. Professional learning, collaboration and peer support are essential for building evidence-informed practice across schools.

When planning throughout the year, Dr Hingston and Ms Singh suggest reflecting on the following:

• Does your assessment plan meet the needs of all stakeholders?
• Does it provide a full picture of student achievement and learning needs?
• How effectively does it measure learning progress?

Thoughtful answers to these questions can help ensure assessment truly serves its most important purpose – supporting every learner’s growth.

Watch the complete webinar recording here for even more valuable guidance, or reach out to the team at school.support@acer.org with any questions.