Obsessed with Assessment

After 10 months and 35 episodes, Obsessed with Assessment is drawing to a close. Sam Denno is moving to a new role at Twinkl Educational Publishing and his focus will no longer be purely on assessment, so he signs off, along with co-host Emma Rose-McHale, with a fittingly lively conversation about top learnings from past episodes. What were Emma and Sam's favourite episodes? And, what are the most important assessment takeaways that they picked up along their journey? All this and more, as we wish farewell to the greatest educational assessment podcast there will ever be.

Sam Denno, assessment lead at Twinkl Educational Publishing, is joined by OCR representatives, Sarah Gotting and Amy Jones, in discussing the negative spiral created by post-16 GCSE Maths resits. They talk through the problem, before Sarah and Amy present OCR's possible solution to the current pattern. OCR are proposing a new-look GCSE as part of the national conversation around curriculum and assessment. Not only does the concept tackle the issue of post-16 resits, it also addresses several other potential frustrations in the present system.

Want to join the OCR Maths Advisory Panel? Submit your interest here. You can find Sam Denno on LinkedIn and BlueSky.

James Beadle becomes only the second podcast guest to make a repeat visit, as he brings his wisdom to bear on the issue of assessment literacy. He argues that all stakeholders in the assessment process - including teachers, students and parents - should have some degree of understanding of the way that assessments work. Everyone could listen into this podcast as a trememdous starting point!

Sam Denno is the host of Obsessed with Assessment and is also the National Assessment Lead at Twinkl Educational Publishing.

James Beadle is a Senior Professional Development Manager at The Assessment Network, an arm of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Tell us what you think about the concepts that are discussed by emailing on [email protected].

"All assessment should be formative, even when it's summative" - so went the wisdom of Obsessed with Assessment host, Sam Denno. His guest in this episode, James Beadle, is here to unpick all of that and add some additional nuance. James considers the purposes of formative and summative assessment respectively, what they set out to achieve, and how we can use intelligent questioning to ensure that we are optimising the functionality of both forms.

Sam Denno is the National Assessment Lead at Twinkl Educational Publishing. James Beadle is a Senior Professional Development Manager at The Assessment Network, an arm of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Further reading: https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/blogs/what-and-why-do-we-assess-in-the-classroom/

You can contact the show using the email address [email protected].

Sam and Emma go to work on assessment validity, poring over the research of Prof Keith Topping to consider everything teachers need to bear in mind when setting both formative and summative tests. If our assessment is invalid then there is little point in doing it, so it is worth giving thought to this area. We love to hear your feedback and comments, like and subscribe or email us at [email protected].

Sam Denno sits down with Daisy Christodoulou, Director of Education at No More Marking and author of Seven Myths About Education, to get to grips with another assessment concept. Comparative judgement is a means of testing student work without the need for a complex rubric and offers an efficient and reliable means of marking, particularly when it comes to writing. Daisy speaks passionately about the benefits of comparative judgement - can she win Sam over? Moreover, how convinced are you by the concept?

You can get in touch with the show on [email protected], and you can seek Sam Denno out on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

If you want to know more about the work that Daisy Christodoulou does, then you can visit her blog here and the No More Marking website here.

Daisy references the original calculations of Louis Thurstone which represent the foundation of comparative judgement. If you're interested in these then you can find them here.

Sam Denno and Emma Rose-McHale are back. This time they are exploring self assessment and gauging its effectiveness, backed up by their reading of research by various educational experts. Is self assessment a valuable mechanism in the teacher toolbox, or a waste-of-time gimmick? Sam and Emma consider all of the pros and cons and offer up advice for how it can be embedded most effectively into teacher practice.

Sam Denno is joined by three STEM specialists in order to discuss the alarming TIMSS pupil characteristics report published in March 2025. TIMSS data reveals that the difference between boy and girl attainment in the assessment is "statistically significant" and is the widest gap of any participating country over the last 20 years. Twinkl leaders, Sally Cole (Digital Maths Lead), Sapphire MacDonald (Secondary Maths Lead) and Emma Rose-McHale (STEM Team Leader) chew over the reasons behind the gender gap and offer solutions to teachers seeking to address it. The March 2025 TIMSS report can be found here.

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The Obsessed with Assessment duo dig into the research behind peer assessment, determining its value as a teaching and learning tool. They explore when and when not to use peer assessment. and propose important variables that teachers should bear in mind in order to implement it as effectively as possible.

In this episode we talk to Dr Lewis Doyle about unconscious biases, particularly when it comes to marking and assessment. In a groundbreaking study in 2022, Lewis and his team asked 400 teachers to mark the same piece of work but provided different pupil contexts to the teachers before they began. The results were fascinating. Lewis talks about the research and what we can learn from it as both educators and members of wider society. The full report can be found in the British Journal of Educational Psychology here. Lewis is a post-doctoral researcher at the Université de Poitiers and a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex. He has a particular interest in how social psychological processes contribute to educational outcomes and prejudice. He belongs to a group of psychologists calling themselves the School Inclusion Group who carry out research in order to understand and combat educational inequalities.