Planning your assessment for the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA)

Which factors do you need to consider when planning the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA)

Which factors do you need to consider when planning assessment? The Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) will point you in the direction of the 5Ws and H. Who, what, when, where why and how?  

• Who will be assessed? Learners or staff. 
• What will be assessed? Is there a unit in a particular subject, a topic, work standards etc;? 
• When will it be assessed? Dates and times. 

• Where will it be assessed? Classroom, workplace, workshop, another environment. 
• Why will it be assessed? To assess knowledge, skills and understanding. 
• How will it be assessed? The types e.g., initial, formative or summative. The methods e.g., observation, assignment, test, oral questions, looking at work products etc. 

As an assessor of the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA), I always ask myself, can I use holistic assessment? So, can I assess several aspects in one go to save me time? Can I use peer or self-assessment? Do I need to create assignments, prepare questions and sample answers? For this course I had to prep it all. Lastly, what are your learner’s prior knowledge and experience. This will help you to plan assessment to your learners needs.  

Risks in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA)

Risks are considered in the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement (CAVA) as things that may ruin the assessment. Let’s talk briefly about plagiarism, can learners plagiarise work, can they work together, can they copy each other? Can then copy my blogs or my materials? The answer is yes. So, we need to consider whether learners can cheat and how we can monitor this. We need to consider the health, safety and welfare of learners. Are we putting them in dangerous positions?

Let’s look at the security qualifications and if you are not familiar with this, physical intervention is a module that needs to be assessed and is about physically putting your hands on another person. As such there are additional dangers that we need to consider in our assessments. You may hear the term over and underassessing learners. This means assessing learners too much or not enough in order to meet the learning outcomes. Language barriers – do we have learners who speak a different language which is often in the construction industry so do we give sufficient time or explain things accurately to our learners.  

Risks are not solely about learners but could be risks to assessors. I’ve seen it in training providers where assessors are given a high workload. Therefore, there is a risk that the assessor is rushing the work, there may be pressures upon the training centre passing learners to meet targets and you often hear this about schools in the news.  

The best piece of advice I can give you is to involve your learners in the process. Do they have any specific dates they can’t attend, times, access, language needs, learning difficulties, shift patterns? Unless you ask them, they won’t know so keep them involved in the process so you can meet their individual needs.