Assessment...

I have been pondering how to assess the children's learning from a SOLE. There is plenty of opportunity for light formative assessment at the end of each session, where we discuss what the children learnt but my main concern is how to assess retention of learning. The issue here is that although the children are obviously finding out a lot, when asked at the end of a session, everything is still fresh in the mind from the last half hour. How do I know that the children have actually learnt anything that they will remember?

There are many methods of assessment to use, the preferred one in Finland seems to be an in-class test, but if we want to keep with the spirit of SOLE then perhaps a test is not the best way. Although it would be very interesting to try, for instance, a science unit and then give a standard test at the end.  A suggested method in the SOLE toolkit is getting the children to produce a poster with everything they find out written down. This of course has its issues. The children may not write down everything or may simply copy from the internet and not learn anything. What I want to assess is, to really prove if SOLE education works is learning retention. What happens when we come back to the topic. Have the children remembered anything from the experience?