KS3 HISTORY

History theme links

Rationale behind assessment planning:

The assessments in KS3 assess 2 main skill areas: ‘Knowledge and Understanding’ and ‘Sources and Interpretations skills’. These two main areas are then broken down further in order to assess different concepts and skills that fall under the two brackets.

For ‘Knowledge and Understanding’ we focus on second order concepts such as causation, significance and consequence so that students are being assessed not only on their knowledge in the topic but also on how far they understand how something may have caused something else to happen, or what impacts something may have had on people, events or places or why something is significant in History.

For ‘Sources and Interpretation skills’ we break the skill down into sources and their utility, and interpretations and making comparisons. Students are assessed on their understanding of how useful sources are by requiring them to use source content, their own knowledge and, eventually, provenance. They are then assessed on their understanding of how interpretations may give different opinions about the same topic and why that may be; students are required to identify the messages in the interpretations and consider the main differences between the two interpretations and, finally, consider why the two interpretations give different opinions.

Throughout the year, the students will also be given quick knowledge based tests that will support their understanding of the topic and their ability to recall knowledge. This will benefit the students as they prepare for their assessments throughout the academic year.

How our assessments show progress from Y7-Y8:

Below you will find a grid that shows the plan for assessment in KS3 across the year.

In each half term we will focus on a particular skill area and concept (as highlighted below). The assessments in both years for each half term are mirrored so that they are comparative and clearly show progression between the years- this progression will be clearly seen within how the assessment is planned and in what we require from the students (as highlighted below in orange) and this will also be presented in the mark schemes.

How our assessments are presented in KS3:

Our assessments will be all together in a booklet that includes feedback, feed forward and therapy activities.

Our knowledge based tests will be completed on Google forms.

All assessment data will be individually kept by the teacher but also collated together in a shared document