Three very simple ways of using Create a Test

18 November 2014

Hello everyone!

 

We all know that createatest is the best way to create summative assessment that perfectly matches your scheme of work, with graded, professional looking questions and automatically generated grade boundaries.

 

But how often do you give assessments? Every term? That's still 15 assessment points across your five year groups, but there is plenty more that can be done. Here are three brief suggestions to help you use createatest to improve your practice and save you time.

 

In my department, we have a combination of both summative and formative assessment. The summative assessment contains combinations of questions that give us the best possible idea of a student's grade, giving them the opportunity to answer questions at (at least) a grade above their current grade, so that no student is held back by our assessment. It also tests them on a wise range of topics. Our formative assessment tests the students only on the most recent three 'sequences' or topics, allowing us to accurately determine whether they have learned what we've taught them. Our expectations of them on these tests are far higher, since the content should be fresh in their memory, but we only return a percentage, rather than a grade, since the content covered isn't broad enough to yield an accurate grade. We then regenerate the tests for those students who have failed to achieve sufficient marks, while also of course marking the papers and building up a database of areas where students struggle, to use in ongoing target setting.

 

Secondly, our formative use of summative assessment. Every time we set a summative assessment, we record the marks to inform our assessment, ask our students to correct thepaper, then regenerate the entire paper and set it again. This reinforces two things in our students minds: firstly that it's ok to make mistakes. Secondly, that it's incredibly important to learn from our mistakes. This is an incredibly quick and easy process, and we hope that it engenders a culture of our students being aware of the areas they struggle in, and working to improve term by term.

 

Thirdly, once a term we use createatest to produce an assessment paper on questions they have answered incorrectly on previous assessments. This is automatically generated at the touch of a button and provides students with an opportunity to take a test perfectly suited to them. That data is then input back into the system and the process repeats.

 

Three very simple ways of using createatest to make your assessment more robust and to save yourselves time. Please tweet us @createatest with your suggestions!

 

Regards,

Create a Test Team

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