Monthly Archives: December 2018

Operation Maths Assessment Records (infants to second class) on Excel

At Operation Maths we are constantly looking for ways to improve the usability of our programme, and to make it even more teacher-friendly. The most recent additions included long term plans for various combinations of multi-classes as well as excel versions of our Assessment Records. Following on from feedback from teachers, these include all the assessments for the entire school year, as well as incorporating extra features designed to make them even more teacher-friendly.

While there are already word versions of these assessment records available to download from Edco Learning, as well as the hard copy photocopiables in the Teacher’s Resource Books (TRBs), these excel versions provide teachers with a more efficient and flexible way to both record and analyse the results from the Assessment Booklets:

• Quickly get a total attainment score for each child (Assessment of Learning)
• Use these attainment scores to compare the attainment of various individuals and/or groups of children and identify children in need of further support (Assessment for Learning).
• Quickly get a score for each learning outcome, use these scores to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the class as a whole, while also being able to identify which learning outcome(s) require further consolidation (Assessment for Learning).

And this is all achievable in a very teacher-friendly way:

• Each of the five assessments ( eg End of October, End of December etc ) has a dedicated page; click the tab at the bottom to move between them.
• Teachers need only enter the children’s names once only on the first page; the inbuilt formulas then copy these names to the other pages in the document.
• Under each child’s name, the teacher can enter a score for each question (or page in junior infants); see more below for a suggested scoring system.
• The score for each individual question (or page) will be automatically totalled (horizontally across bottom) to give an attainment score for each child.
• When all the scores have been entered for each child, these will also be totalled along the right-hand side vertically to give a total for each learning outcome.
• After the five assessment tabs, there is a tab entitled “All”. Here all the scores from each assessment will be automatically replicated, once entered on the original assessment tab. This allows the teacher to easily view all the data in one screen. The scores for each child will also be totalled here to give you an overall score.
• Other useful information provided includes the specific strand and strand unit (S.SU) to which the learning outcome relates. These are abbreviated and a full explanation of the abbreviation is given on the last tab.

Suggested Scoring System

While teachers can devise and use any system which they prefer, one option would be to try the following:

• 4 = Question answered fully and correctly
• 3 = Question answered fully but without full accuracy ie almost all correct
• 2 = Has a majority of correct responses but a number of errors also
• 1 = Some correct responses but a majority of errors
• 0 = Not attempted or incorrect responses

Obviously, teachers will have to apply any scoring system in a flexible way; for example if there is a question that requires just one response and is therefore is either correct or incorrect, then only 0 or 4 will be awarded.

Once the appropriate score has been entered for each question then the teacher will have:

• a total attainment score for each child; the higher the score the more learning outcomes achieved.
• the means to sort and/or compare the attainment of various individuals and/or groups of children using these total attainment scores and identify those children with the lowest scores as needing further support.
• the means to to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the class as a whole by sorting/comparing the total scores for the learning outcomes, while also being able to identify which learning outcome(s) would benefit from further teaching.

 

Downloading and using

The excel documents for each class level are available to download by clicking on the links below:

Operation Maths Jnr Infants Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths Snr Infants Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths 1 Assessment Record BETA

Operation Maths 2 Assessment Record BETA

You may notice that these are still BETA versions only. This is because we would welcome more feedback on the usability of these documents.

Feedback can be left on this Edco Primary Maths facebook post or messaged to Edco Primary Maths.

Some questions you might consider answering:

• Did you find the excel document(s) useful?
• Did you find the scoring system useful?
• What suggestions would you make to improve them?