Views & Opinion Assessment without levels:
How can schools and teachers adapt? Comment by James Bell, Director of Professional Services, Renaissance Learning
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enaissance Learning spends a lot of time speaking to teachers. Whether it’s feedback on our products, finding out their needs or just listening to how they feel about the work they do. Listening to teachers is at the heart of providing them with the services and support they need. With the new curriculum being introduced in September, we started to hear a lot about the removal of level descriptors from the curriculum and the lack of a replacement for this assessment system. Largely it was positive; levels have been difficult to consistently apply and didn’t meet the needs of students, teachers or parents. However, there were also concerns. The lack of a standardised replacement left teachers feeling unsure of how to embrace this new approach especially in the time given to put a new system in place.
The new system is an opportunity for schools to measure students’ progress based on the criteria they believe is important. Schools can freely choose their own assessment system that will be easy for teachers to use and help better communicate progress and achievement to students and their parents. However, after hearing what teachers
were worried about we’ve been working on a way to help schools to assess without levels. STAR Assessments in the USA have been adapted to a different form of assessment for many years now. We’ve rebuilt our UK STAR Assessment software using that experience and expertise to assess students based on comparison to their peers, judged on skills tests. Renaissance Learning has been working closely with the National Foundation of Educational Research to map their STAR Assessments in reading and maths to the new national curriculum using learning progressions. Using this approach the system can tell teachers where their students sit in terms of knowledge and skills in relation to the rest of the class, the school or across the whole of the UK. A STAR test taken regularly will easily track current understanding as well as progression over time for the majority of students. For struggling students STAR can also be used more regularly to monitor the success and rate of improvement of individual support and attention. It’s easy to access, compare and clearly tracks progress over time – making it incredibly useful when reporting to parents or to Ofsted.
Data analytics can help universities to recruit and retain students more effectively
Comment by Peter Greaves, Head of Collaboration at Portal, the business and technology consultancy
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here once students relied heavily on prospectuses and campus visits to select their university and course, the competition to win the hearts, minds and wallets of students is now being fought on a digital battleground. This requires an equal focus on recruitment, retention and reputation.
Recruitment
Just like the consumer goods and retail industries before them, universities are becoming increasingly interested in using digital marketing techniques. In order to succeed in this area, however, universities will need to develop an intimacy with their prospects by sampling social media, using leading digital marketing tools; analysing that data to create insight; and using that insight to personalise the prospect’s experience with rich content.
Mining this kind of data about prospects and existing students can transform a university’s overall web experience. A personalised experience, informed by a prospect’s declared and often undeclared preferences, creates a stronger relationship at an earlier stage and improves the likelihood of enrolment. For example, if a university can mine its prospects’ social newsfeed – as well as those of the prospect’s wider social network – it will be able to gain a wealth of insight on their interests in subjects and possible
careers. By personalising their approach in this way, universities can actively encourage and facilitate the enrolment process and begin to foster greater engagement.
Retention
Increasing recruitment is only one part of the story, however. Any gains made by increased admissions are completely undermined if the university loses too many students. Reducing attrition levels and loss of revenue provide a very compelling business case for universities to invest in their retention strategy, as it enables them to provide personalised learning paths for each student to drive successful career pathways and employability outcomes.
To do this, institutions should focus on four core steps. Firstly, they should personalise each enrolled student’s ongoing digital experience based on the consolidation of different elements of data from various sources (for example, social media and learned experience in the university’s own data sets).
Secondly, institutions should use insight derived from aggregated data during a student’s educational experience to allow retention and performance problems to be predicted early. Using data about past student performance – visualised in personalised dashboards – can give individual students the insight to make academic
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www.education-today.co.uk
There has been a problem of stranding, getting stuck between levels because of one or two missing skills. In these situations, the system will identify and flag skills that are still needed to particular students. As well as highlighting these it will also detail the pre-requisite skills to making that step up – helping teachers to ensure that students have the understanding to progress their skills and making lesson planning easier while still giving a clear indication of relative achievement and understanding.
STAR is not the only option, we’ve heard that some schools are planning on using other nationalised assessments systems like GSCE grading standards and others are planning a completely new points-based system. Any valid system applied consistently and reliably can offer effective understandable assessment based on what teachers know and trust.
Whatever schools choose to use the key will be ensuring that the system implemented has the full buy-in of teachers, is easy to track over time and forms a reliable metric which is clear to those outside the school environment. Schools have a great opportunity with this change to demonstrate that they know the needs, skills and criteria that will best highlight those achieving and those who need more help within their school environment. Given time and consideration I am sure that schools and teachers are in the best possible position to meet this challenge.
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and learning-practice choices that maximise their potential. This way, students can see which specific changes to their behaviour will help improve their grades.
The third step is to use social collaboration tools and proven business adoption techniques to improve student engagement. Communities, blogs and wikis, forums and social networking tools are directed to support collaborative learning which builds engagement capital and reflects social business practice in business today. Lastly, institutions should provide accessible alternatives to classroom-based learning. Online learning experiences can increase a university’s delivery flexibility enormously, allowing students to overcome logistical difficulties in attendance and improve continuation.
Delivering a personalised experience Future enrolment revenue can also be driven, and retention improved, by using the same experience to step-change the alumni relationship. Alumni are powerful advocates for universities, and can also lend significant mentoring experience for new students, and career guidance for students in latter parts of their educational experience. Prospects that are increasingly focused on education as the route to a career can see alumni success stories as indicators of organisational success. Universities should therefore consider deepening relationships with their alumni, and nurturing them in an ongoing rich digital experience to facilitate their contribution both to enriching current student experience, and as part of the recruitment process. However, in order to do this, universities will need to provide an exceptional student experience that is not only comprehensive, but also capable of adapting to support an individual’s lifelong relationship with the university.
September 2014
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