Piaget found that from about age 12, a student will begin to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems. They begin to use deductive logic. An excellent resource - student friendly and really helpful for embedding key skills for GCSE Geography throughout KS3. (Head of Geography, St Aidan's C of E High School)

text annotation or visual organisers such as thought mapping, storyboards, concept mapping or timelines If you use a box called ‘assessment opportunities’ in your plan it can lead you to compartmentalise assessment. Try to design assessment within the lesson so you can continually monitor students’ progress. In this example, the teacher has annotated the lesson plan to indicate assessment opportunities – see Planning to use assessment for learning within a lesson. If you are using objective-led planning, relate the objectives to the concepts, aspects of achievement and the theme (make sure you include expectations appropriate for higher abilities).

These benchmark expectations provide a shared language to help set expectations and standards. It is intended that they:

What does this progress in geography look like? These broad dimensions of progress, or what it means to get better at geography are essential when thinking about both planning for progression and assessment.

Accompanying resources

Progress means that students are getting better at geography. They do this by broadening their experience and acquiring more knowledge and understanding by engaging with new ideas, applying the ideas to different contexts and consolidating this learning. In this way students develop their understanding of important geographical concepts and gradually build connections within their geographical schemas; in doing so they are making progress. Nevertheless, the challenge to make progress in understanding concepts such as interdependence, development, sustainable development, should not be underestimated for a 14 year old student. Teachers must recognise that there are limits to how far it is reasonable to expect key stage 3 students to think in abstract terms.

Pupils should have the chance to demonstrate their achievement through more formal periodic assessment, typically towards the end of a unit of work. Here the criteria for the unit can be used formatively to identify broad progress, strengths and weaknesses and to identify curriculum targets, as well as summatively to monitor progress towards the benchmark expectations.Where appropriate, Sage reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves . extended or shorter focused pieces of writing in a variety of different forms for a range of purposes Plan different assessment activities to give students opportunities to show what they know, understand and can do. The work that students complete provides evidence of their progress. Work, in this sense, can be very varied – such as talk, map drawing, multi-media presentation – it does not have to be written. Some activities provide more evidence than others; for example, an extended piece of writing can be used for a more in-depth assessment than short answers to questions.

Look at these ‘ level descriptions’ as an example of progress in geography from 5 to 14. These level descriptions were intended to be used for a’ best fit’ assessment at the end of each key stage. Papers should not normally be less than 4000 words in length and should NOT EXCEED 8000 words (inclusive of endnotes but excluding Bibliography). To consider progression in geography, you need to be clear about what is meant by ‘geographical knowledge’ and ‘geographical understanding’. (Read about these in Subject knowledge and refer to Bennett (2005), see Making connections for geographical learning , if you have not already done so).Write some ‘pitch’ statements that you can use to devise a mark scheme or set success criteria. ‘Pitch’ is the term for criteria specifically written for this unit (and these can be in ‘student-speak’). Look at this example of a Key stage 3 unit: tectonic patterns and processes for a model. (Note that objectives and progression are set out using questions when adopting an enquiry approach, and more formally in objective-led planning).