Progress in Geography: Key Stage 3: Motivate, engage and prepare pupils

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

If you are using an enquiry, identify the key questions related to the concepts, aspects of achievement and the theme (make sure you include challenging questions). Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Language Services. Visit Sage Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information. Assessment should be considered when you plan a lesson, not left until afterwards. The essential first step is to identify clear objectives and learning outcomes. Assessment is derived from these. A common pitfall for new teachers is to identify what students are going to do in lessons, rather than what they are going to learn. Avoid this if you are to assess student learning effectively. There is very much a mixed economy of approaches and most schools are evolving a way to assess progress that works best for them. It is critical that the curriculum and its assessment are carefully designed and implemented so that students do secure progress, without which there is a clear risk that the attainment gap will widen. Motivate pupils to develop their geographical skills, knowledge and understanding as they become engaged and accomplished geographers, ready for the demands of GCSE.This sets out the age-related benchmark expectations for 7, 9, 11, 14 and 16 years, developed by the Geographical Association to provide a national framework for teachers to use. They are aligned to the 2014 National Curriculum requirements and to GCSE subject content. The benchmark expectations help set a national standard so that schools can be secure in their judgement for monitoring and reporting purposes. Using the expectations benchmarks, schools could: You should be aware of the possibility for fundamental change that the removal of level descriptions and Ofsted’s change of policy has had on schools. They are now free to decide how to define, assess and report learning in terms of the progress of individual students. Hopkin, J. and Gardner, D. (2023) ‘ Guidance on progression and assessment in geography‘, Sheffield: Geographical Association.

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). During key stage 3 most students move from being concrete thinkers to become formal operational thinkers. At first their thinking will, for the most part, be tied to concrete experiences and they need to relate their ideas to particular objects, events and situations which have reality for them. demonstrating greater fluency with world knowledge by drawing on increasing breadth and depth of content and contexts The next two tiers, understanding and applying, are often demonstrated together in geography; it is common for students to undertake a task where they are asked to make sense of information and then apply it in another context. One of these skills is not demonstrating ‘progress’ over the other. 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.The benchmark expectations are not for sharing directly with students and are of no use in making day to day assessment. However an understanding of the progression shown in the expectations is essential underpinning for assessment for learning practices. Biddulph, M., Lambert, D. and Balderstone, D. (2015) Learning to Teach Geography in the Secondary School: A Companion to School Experience, 3rd edition. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 258–265. As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.