Christmas time is here and we are now all now at home enjoying the holiday. We thought this would be a good time of year to reflect on where is createatest.co.uk going?
For a while we've had the most complete assessment creation system on the market, with questions linked to your exam boards, the ability to create your own questions and infinitely regenerating questions at the touch of a button. Our new features relate all of the questions your students answer to the exam board they're working towards. They allow you to input your students' data, monitor their strengths and weaknesses, improving your understanding of their levels and helping you to pitch your lessons perfectly. You can also produce automatically created, entirely individualised revision materials to improve their performance.
So what's next? Over the next year we'll create a sister site that allows primary school students to benefit from the same features that yours do. This will ensure that students come to you more able than ever before. You'll also be able to access a comprehensive account of your students' abilities, before you've even met them on that first day in September, rather than having to rely on the formatively meaningless 'Level 4' or even worse, 'teacher assessment'.
Secondly, the architecture is now almost in place for us to create multi-paged questions, which will benefit those of you who teach iGCSE specifications and will also pave the way for us to cover all Key Stages, up to KS5, through the addition of questions for each and every A Level module. Imagine having that same data-driven, reliable assessment of students' abilities for each of the modules you teach. Better data leads to more focused 1-to-1 help, more informed revision classes and clearer indications to students of their strengths and weaknesses.
Is that all? Of course not! Another major change is to improve our grading of students. At present grading is incredibly primitive, based on at most three hours' worth of work, often in stressful situations proven to disadvantage certain cohorts. Our new assessment system will be based on months or even years, rather than hours worth of data. Createatest will test your students on every area of the curriculum, on an ongoing basis, and use this to predict, as accurately as possible, their performance were they to take their exam today. You might think that simply giving them an exam paper would be more accurate, but a single exam paper cannot test a student on all the skills they need for their GCSE and there may only be a crossover of a few marks between one year's paper and the next. Our system will collate their ability in every single area of the curriculum, creating a much richer picture of their mathematical skills, and a much more accurate current grade. This will make your predictions more accurate, your teaching more focused and your analysis of student progress more robust.
Finally, and longer term, we will add more automatic data entry. Rather than having to enter data mark by mark, students will be able to access the site from a range of devices, including tablets and mobile phones. Our intelligent software will record their answers, monitoring progress, spotting anomalous correct answers (to put it kindly!) and automatically setting new questions that stretch students in exactly the way they need to be. You'll then receive weekly updates of progress, together with suggested interventions and revision topics. Finally, we hope to build in features that allow students to see a question for the first time, access a resource to teach them the topic, then work through questions to test their understanding. You will have a system that empowers genuine independent learning alongside watertight assessment.
And then? Who knows? At createatest.co.uk we never rest on our laurels.
We'd like to thank you for your support and your custom and assure you that the rate of improvement of our site will not slow down until we have the ultimate mathematical assessment system.
The future is looking bright! (though right now Manchester and London quite chilly)