Tag Archives: assessment

Early Years’ Profiles and Charts

Posted on by
Reply

Some of our Partner schools have been trialling the new Foundation Stage Profiles for Early Years since late last year and now have lots of profile data to work with. The revised framework covers children from 24-36 months, 36-48 months and with final Early Learning Goals at the end of the Key Stage. They will not be adopted in the UK untill September but we have used an early draft of the profiles to help  our schools prepare well in advance.

Observations of a child are recorded by ticking off observations in the MarkBook using the “EEE” criteria of Emerging, Expected and Exceeding.

The statements within an age range are organised under the three prime areas for development (Communication and Language, Physical Development, Personal Social and Emotional Development) and the four specific areas for learning (Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World, Expressive Arts and Design). An overview sheet for the whole class is available with coloured boxes indicating the degree of completeness in each area with Dark Green, Green, Yellow and Pink indicating 85%, 60%, 35% and 10% as Exceeding respectively.

Click to enlarge the EYFS residual sheet.

Clicking a child’s name in the sheet will provide a star chart of an individual’s total scores for each of the areas (in Green below) overlaid on the mean scores for the whole class (in Blue). Each axis in the plot represents one of the areas.

The star chart provides a very easy way to spot strengths and possible weaknesses for a child. While the overall figures in blue may highlight areas which need to receive more attention and time in the classroom for the group as a whole.

 

Traffic light indicators for student progress

Posted on by
Reply

The assessment profiles are a way of grouping related assessments in the MarkBook and providing tools to analyse the results. A new tool available with release 1.0.17 of ClaSS provides an immediate and colourful indicator to spot when students attainment moves forward or sometimes drops back.

Trafic light progress indicators

Key Stage 3 assessment profile with traffic light indicators

The column to the right is their baseline attainment from the previous year the and blue column to the left gives a measure of the amount of progress between that and the most recent assessment to date. The new feature adds a comparison between each assessment column and the one before with Green for improvement and Red for a drop. The result is immediate and effective.

In the above example the profile is working with National Curriculum Levels but the same method could be applied to any assessment scheme designed to show incremental progress over time.

Thanks go to staff in a number of ClaSS schools, including Lynn in Amsterdam and Graham in Prague, who have made suggestions for this new feature.

Training event in Madrid: ClaSS Assessment Management

Posted on by
Reply

Location: King’s College School La Moraleja in the ICT suite

When: Monday 10th at 14:30 – 16:00

Audience: Anyone who might associate their responsibilities with the job titles Curriculum and Assessment Manager or Director of Studies.

We’ll look at how assessments are defined and managed in ClaSS, cover grouping assessments into profiles for tracking student progress and learn to make use of the tools for defining the assessment structure for a course for a full year. New features for generating reports from assessment profiles will be covered.

To access the training sites: Group 1 and Group 2

GCSE Performance Analysis

Posted on by
Reply

The assessment profiles in ClaSS provide a means of grouping and organising assessments in the MarkBook. Their fundamental function though is to allow for reporting and analysis of student grades and they accommodate any kind of custom template to achieve this. A new template has just been completed for analysis of GCSE grade performance. Developed in consultation with academic staff in one ClaSS school its now available to other schools on request.

Subject level analysis

Subject level analysis of A*/A and A-C performance.

It provides for both student level monitoring of A*/A and A – C grades at regular intervals during the course, and for summary percentages of A*/A and A* – C at subject level.

View the full example of the sheet gcse_attainment_analysis.

Compare with the custom template performing the same function at Key Stages 1 and 2, and it gives an indication of how flexible and powerful the templating system can be.

Progression across Key Stages 1 and 2

Posted on by
Reply

Attainment grid for Year 1

Attainment grid for Year 1

Tracking attainment within the MarkBook has been done for a while now by grouping related assessments together as an “Attainment Profile”. Well new charting functionality has been added to these profiles which makes it much easier to get an overview of the results for a class or even a whole cohort. A great example is the chart used at Key Stages 1 and 2 and shown in the screen-shot.

The example plots the results of four assessments over the course of a year for one class where the size of the dots on the grid indicates the number of students achieving at a given NC Level. The progression over the year (going from bottom to top) is immediately revealed by the shift in the dots from left to right with more students achieving higher levels. The coloured backgrounds act as a guideline with white indicating the target achievement band.

The new charting functions allow for many different kinds of plots and even for a degree of interactivity. In case of the KS1 and KS2 grids you can see demonstrated in the training video how this has been used to highlight individual students within the context of the cohort.