What the PYP asks of assessment
The enhanced PYP describes assessment as four connected practices: monitoring learning, documenting it, measuring it, and reporting it. Monitoring is the everyday noticing of what students understand; documenting is capturing evidence of it; measuring is judging that evidence against learning goals and success criteria; reporting is telling students, families and the school what was found. PYP: From principles into practice is the authority for all four and for the expectations around them, and a school's own assessment policy must show how it meets them.
Two things follow. Assessment is meant to happen throughout a unit, not at its end; and students are meant to be agents in it, setting goals, judging their own work against criteria and choosing evidence for their portfolio. A school in which assessment is something done to children in the last week of a unit is not yet doing PYP assessment, whatever its report card says.
Learning goals and success criteria
The measuring practice depends on students knowing what they are aiming at. For each unit and for the skills within it, teachers and students agree learning goals and the success criteria that show they have been met, in language students can use. The criteria then do three jobs: they guide teaching, they let students self-assess and peer-assess, and they make the teacher's judgement explainable to a parent.
Success criteria written after the work, to fit it, or kept in the teacher's planner and never shown to students, remove the student from the process. The test to apply is whether a student in the class could tell a visitor what good work in this unit looks like.
Documenting: portfolios and the evidence of growth
Documentation is where most schools have the most to gain. A PYP portfolio is a curated collection of a student's work and reflections across the year, chosen with the student, that shows growth in knowledge, in conceptual understanding, in approaches-to-learning skills and in the learner profile. It is not a folder of every worksheet, and it is not assembled in June.
- Chosen, not collected: the student picks pieces with the teacher, and says why each one shows growth.
- Dated and reflective: each piece carries a short reflection written at the time.
- Across dimensions: knowledge, concepts, skills and attributes, not only written products.
- Shared: the portfolio is the spine of student-led conferences and of the reporting conversation.
Reporting: what a PYP report should say
The programme requires reporting to families that reflects the whole of the PYP: the transdisciplinary units and the subject learning within them, the approaches-to-learning skills, the learner profile attributes and the action students took. It does not prescribe the format. A report that reduces all of that to a single grade per subject has thrown away most of what the school knows.
A report a parent can actually use says, for each unit or subject, what the child was learning, what they can now do against the success criteria, what was hard, and what comes next. It uses the school's chosen descriptors consistently, explained once at the top. And it includes the child's own voice, because a student who has been self-assessing all year has something to say. The conference, three-way or student-led, is where the report becomes a conversation rather than a verdict.
Conferences, and who speaks
PYP schools typically run two kinds of conference. A three-way conference brings the student, the parent and the teacher together to discuss the portfolio and set goals; the student speaks first. A student-led conference is run by the student for the parent, with the teacher present but in the background, and is the clearest demonstration of agency the programme offers. Both need preparation: students rehearse what they will show and say, and the portfolio is ready before the day.
Where schools struggle
Schools transitioning into the PYP, or reviewing their practice before evaluation, meet the same difficulties.
- Keeping a marks-based report beside the PYP report, so families read the number and ignore the rest.
- Assessing only at the end of the unit, so there is no evidence of growth to report.
- Success criteria written by teachers alone and never used by students.
- Portfolios that are collections rather than selections, with no reflections.
- Reporting the learner profile as a tick list rather than with evidence of when an attribute was shown.
- No shared assessment policy, so practice varies by classroom and cannot be explained at evaluation.
