Assessment

Rationale

At Future International Academy, we believe that assessment provides the basis of informed teaching, helping pupils to overcome difficulties and ensuring that teaching builds upon what has been learned. It is also the means by which students understand what they have achieved and what they need to work on. Assessment plays an important part in helping parents, teachers and the school to recognize children’s progress, understand their needs, and to plan activities and support. Once a child is admitted to the school, there will be ongoing assessments made of your child’s progress.

Aims and Objectives

• To raise the standards of achievement throughout the school
• To maintain accurate records of the progress and attainment of individual children and cohorts
• To ensure consistency in assessing achievement and identifying achievable and challenging targets for each child
• To enable the active involvement of pupils in their own learning
• To enable teachers and other professionals to use assessment judgements to plan work that accurately reflects the needs of individual pupils
• To provide regular information for parents that enables them to support their child’s learning
• To provide the information that allows school leaders and governors to make judgements about the effectiveness of the school and to evaluate the school’s performance against its own previous attainment over time and against national standards

Types of Assessment

a. Formative Assessment (Assessment for Learning)

Formative assessment is a powerful way of raising pupils’ achievement. It is based on the principle that pupils will improve most if they understand the aim of their learning, where they are in relation to this aim and how they can achieve the aim. These include differentiated activities, cooperative work, graded worksheets and graded projects.
Formative assessments are used to:

• Identify children’s strengths and gaps in their skills/knowledge
• Identify next steps for learning
• Inform future planning
• Enable appropriate strategies to be employed
• Facilitate the setting of appropriate targets for the class, group, and individual
• Track the child’s rate of progress
• Facilitate an evaluation of the effectiveness of teaching and learning
• Inform future teaching and learning strategies
• Identify individuals and groups for specific intervention support.

b. Summative Assessment – Assessment of Learning

Summative assessment (Assessment of Learning) is important for informing both parents and teachers of a child’s attainment and progress. This will also inform whole school target setting and prediction of a cohort’s future attainment. These include quizzes, mid-semester and final semester exams. In addition, the school conducts a diagnostic test at the beginning of the year in the main subjects (Science, Math, English and Arabic from Kg to 12) to identify gaps in learning and prepare the action plan for each student accordingly.
Summative assessments are used to:

• Identify attainment through one-off standardized tests at any given point in time
• Record performance in a specific area on a specific date
• Provide age standardized information
• Provide end of key stage test data against which the school will be judged
• Ensure statutory assessments at the end of EYFS, KS1 and KS2 are met
• Provide information about cohort areas of strength and weakness to build from in the future.

• • Internal assessments

KG section
Students have continuous assessments throughout the year, two assessments (check points) in each semester
Cycle 1 (grades 1 to 5)
Students have contentious assessment throughout the year, 5 assessments in each semester
Cycles 2 and 3 (grades 6 to 12)
Students have mid-semester and final exams in each semester in addition to short quizzes to measure their understanding level.  

Exam Policies and Instructions

• No printed / written assessments – all assessments are conducted online (using Schoology mainly).
• Camera is required during the mid-semester and final exams. If the camera is not opened, then the exam is not valid and the student will sit up for a redo one.
• The duration of mid-semester exam is 60 minutes while the duration of final exam is 90 minutes.

• • External assessments

MAP Test
MAP, or the Measure of Academic Progress, is a computerized adaptive test which helps teachers, parents, and administrators improve learning for all students and make informed decisions to promote a child’s academic growth. This assessment is designed to target a student’s academic performance in mathematics, reading, language and science. These tests are tailored to an individual’s current achievement level. This gives each student a fair opportunity to show what he or she knows and can do. Because the computer adjusts the difficulty of the questions as the test progresses, each student takes a unique test.
The students from Grade 1 to Grade 11 has a MAP Exam throughout the year for three windows (Winter, Fall, and Spring) with the following subjects.

• Grade 10 sits for PSAT to prepare them for the SAT exams in grades 11 and 12
• Grades 11 and 12 sit for SAT and IELTS/TOEFL exams.
• Grade 12 sits for the EMSAT (Arabic, English, MATH, Physics, and Chemistry).

AP Test
AP Exams are standardized exams designed to measure how well students have mastered the content and skills of a specific AP course. The AP courses are offered in grades 11 and 12 for Math, English and Science. Students will have internal school exams in addition to the external exams that are offered by the end of the academic year; mainly in May and June. Students are notified time ahead to register.

Revised 2020-2021