Assessing Place and Time

Most teachers want to check on the value of their schemes, the effectiveness of their methods of teaching, the suitability of resources used by the children and the progress made by them. In recent years much work has been done on accountability in Number and Language, but Place and Time, as with all areas of topic work, particularly in the 5 to 9 age-range, have not been considered sufficiently important to evaluate. John Bentley links this inertia as regards Place to lack of planned schemes and objectives in its teaching; he says ‘It is the lack of specific guidelines which deters evaluation’ because “you cannot produce successful evaluation of geographic learning without explicitly stated objectives” (Kaufman, 1971, p. 27)’ 1 Phil Clift also links planned schemes with record-keeping when he writes of ‘the relationship between curriculum planning and record-keeping - the alpha and the omega of the matter’. 2 In this book I have already suggested guidelines as to the form of schemes, and skills and concepts to be taught, so it is now more possible to formulate a practicable method of assessment and record-keeping.