Education Scotland hosted a series of webinars in May 2021 for secondary sciences teachers to support the SQA Alternative Certificate Model. The webinars provided practitioners with the opportunity to share practice and approaches with their peers. Attendees were also signposted to resources designed to support the SQA Alternative Certification Model (ACM).
The PDF document at the foot of this post contains some of the PowerPoint slides used to direct teachers to key sources of support and guidance including:
- SQA Alternative certification model
- SQA Academy
- SQA Understanding Standards FAQ and ACM FAQ
- National e-Learning Offer (NeLO)
- West OS Revision resource for Higher Chemistry/Higher Biology
- Digilearn.scot blog: Support for digital quality assurance
We’re grateful to all the teachers that attended and shared their approaches to verification and cross marking in the break out room discussions. Feedback from attendees was that they found this to be reassuring and supportive. Teachers were also offered support for further networking and matching up to other schools, where required, to support QA processes.
Some of the approaches discussed were:
- Reviewing and discussing the Understanding Standards materials and SQA Academy
- Standardising the marking scheme within our individual departments, peer assess papers within the department then verify a sample of papers externally across the cluster.
- Cross-marking and verification internally and across the authority
- Ways of chunking or splitting paper and subsequent decisions around grade boundaries
During the sessions, teachers identified areas where further detail would be helpful. Education Scotland collated these questions and shared them with SQA colleagues. The responses provided by SQA to these questions are attached below.
Downloads
