One of the big strengths of the developmental model is that it makes assessment more useful. The amount of schools who are knee deep in data that they use up all their precious teacher time gathering to then do nothing with is kind of depressing.

Patrick Griffin’s work at the University of Melbourne helped put a pretty simple idea back on the table: assessment should make learning visible over time. That sounds obvious, but schools are full of assessment systems that produce scores, grades, and comparisons without giving much help on the thing people actually want to know. What can this student do now? What are they getting better at? What should happen next? How can we use evidence from students to improve our teaching?

That’s where the developmental model has real advantages.

For students, it usually means feedback gets less vague and less personal. Instead of a mark that lands like a small judgement on their intelligence or effort or future prospects, they get information tied to actual features of their work. That matters. It shifts the focus from “How did I rank?” to “What am I doing now, and what's next?” Which, frankly, is a much better use of everyone’s time. Students, particularly at the lower end of the current ability scale, feel assessment as negative, disempowering and  shame-inducing. Assessment is just information and shouldn’t be treated as personal judgement.

For parents and carers, it makes reporting more concrete. A single grade often tells them almost nothing unless they already know how to decode the school’s internal logic. Developmental descriptions are clearer. They show what a student can currently do within an area of learning, and what progress might reasonably look like next. That makes support at home a bit less like guesswork. Not to mention the fact that grades on reports don’t really mean anything. A B in science is not the same as a B in RVE and a B in Year 7 is not the same as a B in Year 10.

For teachers, the benefit is not just philosophical. It’s practical. Shared criteria make marking more efficient, moderation more grounded, and professional conversations less fuzzy. Instead of arguing in circles about whether a piece of work is “good”, teams can talk about what is actually visible in it. Over time, that builds a shared language around learning, which is one of those things schools say they have all the time and often don’t. Developmental thinking about asssessment isn’t always quicker but the time you do spend on assessment is more impactful.

The developmental model increases the teaching payoff of assessment. It helps turn evidence into action. Once that starts happening, assessment stops being a bureaucratic ritual and becomes what it was supposed to be in the first place: a way of seeing development clearly enough to respond to it.

Assessment has a very bad rap, but maybe that’s because we’re doing it wrong… 🤔

[Photo by Katrina Wright on Unsplash]