Pre-assessments using CENTURY diagnostics

CENTURY is an online learning platform that uses AI to personalise learning and provide teachers with actionable insights to support their teaching. Taryn Davison has over ten years’ experience as a primary teacher and Maths Lead. Now working in our Customer Success team training our schools and colleges, she wanted to put our CENTURY training to the test as well as use our new benchmarking data reports in a real-life setting. She taught a CENTURY maths lesson weekly for half a term to a Year 4 class at St. John’s C of E Primary School, Abram. Part of Quest Academy Trust, St. John’s has been using CENTURY for the past six years. This blog series shares her findings.

After discussion with the Year 4 teacher, I arranged to teach Decimals to the Year 4 class, building on their previous work on the topic of Fractions. These topics overlap, but I didn’t have time to discuss the class’s prior knowledge with their teacher—a common challenge for teachers during handovers. Often, we have to plan our teaching without knowing what students already understand, which isn’t ideal.

This is where CENTURY shines. The platform’s primary maths diagnostics assess each objective in the national curriculum for the current year group, and it even includes objectives from the previous year to gauge prior learning. So, the first thing I did was have the class complete the Fractions and Decimals diagnostic on CENTURY as a pre-unit assessment.

Results

The diagnostic I set had a wide range of completion times, from 38 seconds (one student who got everything wrong) to 14 minutes (another student who also struggled), with scores ranging from 0% to 71%. Benchmarking data placed the class at 8% below average in this assessment.*

As the scores came in, the question level analysis in the Nuggets tab clearly showed that students were struggling with questions on tenths and hundredths. To address this, I quickly assigned the nugget on “2dp: Recognising Place Value in Decimals” to those who had finished the diagnostic. The diagnostic’s question on this topic involved problem-solving, so I wanted to determine whether students misunderstood the concept or simply the phrasing of the question (as this is a key concept in this topic).

With the class averaging 40% in the diagnostic, the results indicated the need to revisit prior learning. Worryingly, about five students were flagged in the Interventions graph (the image below that shows students in different quadrants based on their performance) as not engaging at all. The nugget took an additional five minutes to complete after the diagnostic, so the students spent about 25 minutes on CENTURY overall. This was the right amount of time as I could tell that a few students were starting to get fidgety.

Assessment for Learning

After completing the diagnostic, I had about 30 minutes left of the lesson. I switched to traditional Assessment for Learning methods: teaching at the whiteboard, having students answer questions verbally or in their jotters, and using self-assessment to quickly gauge their understanding. I delved deeper into concepts like ‘place value’ and ‘what a decimal is,’ lightly touching on all the objectives in my future lesson plans to assess their prior knowledge.

I did this to get the best possible picture of students’ learning and this exercise revealed a significant variation in ability within the class:

• Higher-ability students performed much better during this part of the lesson than they had on CENTURY, raising the question of why their CENTURY scores were lower. 
• The lower-ability students had a wider range of abilities than CENTURY had indicated. 

My teacher-led assessment confirmed the diagnostic results regarding the serious learning gaps in some students and increased my understanding of where exactly these were. In five weeks time, I also planned to redo the diagnostic to see the impact of CENTURY and my teaching on the student’s outcomes.

Takeaways for diagnostics:

1. Pre-assessment: CENTURY’s diagnostic assessments are perfect for a quick snapshot of what the students know in a specific topic and can easily be reset as a post-assessment.
2. Teacher assessment: Combine diagnostic data with your own understanding of the class in order to ‘level’ the students to get the best understanding of ability.
3. Difficulty of diagnostic questions: If students have performed lower than you would have expected on the diagnostic, it’s worth thinking about why (e.g. their ability to access worded questions and multi-step problems).
4. Low-attaining students: Since the diagnostic assesses end-of-year objectives, low-attaining students had similar scores, use teacher judgement to assess their actual working ‘level’.
5. Behaviour for Learning: Are students used to completing assessments (on CENTURY) or do they rush through and not view it as a ‘real assessment’? This may need to be addressed.

Tune in next week to hear how Taryn used diagnostic data to inform her planning. Click here to book a demo of CENTURY. 

* A future blog will discuss what/how to use the benchmarking data.