Increasing pupil confidence

published:October 2009

How can we increase our pupils’ confidence in their ability to learn?

Research evidence

Learning something new always involves a lack of control and the probability of making mistakes. It can feel a risky business. Pupils feel more confident about their ability to learn when they understand how assessment can help them make progress (ie. formative assessment or assessment for learning). Assessment that simply tests pupils just makes pupils more conscious of what they can’t do than what they can (summative assessment).

Your evidence

You might like to work with a group of pupils from your class and discuss with them examples of some assessments that you have made. You could look in particular at any comments and corrections that you made on their written work and find out from your pupils how they felt about your responses and their work. Can they explain how their revised work is better?

Next steps

How could you go about ensuring that when you give pupils feedback that challenges their thinking that they feel positive about it and understand clearly how they can improve? Could you work with your pupils to negotiate criteria with pupils by which their work will be evaluated?  Perhaps some pupils could complete learning logs in selected lessons so that you and they could explore connections between how they felt in lessons and your comments?