Rethinking Assessment Objective 1

I've been thinking a little more about Assessment Objective 1 (AO1) in the GCSE English Language Papers. It's supposedly the 'easiest' assessment objective for students to access - or at least, it's the one we start the paper with.

It requires students to 'Identify and interpret explicit and implicit information and ideas.', as well as 'Select and synthesise evidence from different texts.'

In theory, this appears rather simple: students just need to pick out the relevant information from both texts and compare the similarities or differences.

In practice, it's been so, so interesting to see students struggle with AO1 this week!

Subtle differences between the texts are lost, generalisations are made which lack sufficient nuance, and the language used to summarise the two texts loses some of their original meaning.

It does make me really appreciate the importance of AO1 further - and I do wonder whether it should be weighted more heavily in an age where selecting, identifying and summarising relevant information is going to become ever more important!