“How can I assess the pupils understanding of ICT?”. A question often asked by primary ICT coordinators and assessment managers at schools throughout the country. It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while too.
I’ve considered using pupils self assessment through ‘Can do’ sheets, considered creating our own assessment tests, and considered several commercial solutions. One of those commercial solutions I had seen a while ago, in a beta version, was 2Assess from 2Simple. It struck a chord with me and was the solution I opted for when given permission to buy an ICT assessment solution for the school. It was a choice well made.
I read through the manual, then handed it over to our technician with a simple request: install it on the server, so that every child’s assessments are recorded centrally and can be accessed by any member of staff.
We had a false start initially after the software was rolled out across the network, as it turned out that this way would mean that each machine would need to be registered individually, and results would not be able to be viewed with all other results, but after a phone call to 2Simple and a central install on the server with all machines pulling the information from that he achieved what we wanted and, over the past two weeks, I’ve been using it to do exactly what it was bought for - assessing the pupils’ ICT capabilities.
Pupils launch 2Assess from an icon on their desktop when they log onto the network. The program opens with a choice of either ‘Mixed’ activities (there are 6 available which roughly equate to skill levels expected for Years 1-6) or ‘Topics’ that group activities together into similar types (pictograms, directions, text, pictures, web, sequences, text & graphics, databases, email, writing, control, etc)
"Mixed" is good for getting an overview of a pupils ability across the ICT curriculum as it provides a range of various activities for them to complete, whilst "Topics" is a useful way for them to refine their skills in a particular area.
Once an assessment has been selected, the pupil is asked to enter their name and class. This is used at the end of the assessment for the feedback and certificate features. 2Simple have included the ability to create a “names.csv” file of pupils in school (numerical and alphabetical order is important within this) that can be dropped into the 2Assess installation folder on the server so that when a pupil selects their class a drop down list of classes in school appears, and once a class has been selected, clicking on the name box lists all the pupils in that class, as you can see in the image above.
The actual assessments are very straightforward and all pupils instantly understood how the program worked. Once a pupil clicks on an activity a short video plays that explains, very clearly, what the task involves, what they need to do, and how to use the resources on screen (note that headphones are essential as the thought of 30 laptops all speaking at the same time was unbearable). With the explanation given the task begins. It is timed at four minutes - although you can alter the amount given in the advanced settings if you desire. If a child is struggling on the activity, they can view the introduction video again, or they can click on a ‘Tips’ button. Be aware though - clicking on the ‘Tips’ button will deduct quite an amount from the final score of the activity.
Another very useful feature of the tasks is the random nature of the task that appears. Two children, sat next to each other completing the same assessment could be given two different texts to work through. This means that a child cannot just look to the side and copy from another screen - it might not be relevant to the task they are completing.
Once an activity is completed, or the time runs out, the pupils sees the score they achieved on that activity (as a percentage) and they can then move onto another activity within the assessment until they have completed the whole assessment.
When the assessment is completed the pupils see a handy feedback sheet on screen that lists the activities they took, how they performed on each one (where they did well, where the struggled, and whether they asked for tips). There are two additional blank boxes for each activity too - pupil comments and staff comments boxes. These can be used when the feedback sheet is printed out. These boxes allow pupils and staff to record additional information related to each activity.
As well as being able to print out the feedback sheet, there is also an option to print out a certificate. A school logo can be automatically placed on the certificate (you set this in the advanced settings) and the certificate uses the name / class that were entered at the start of the assessment.
When an assessment is completed it automatically records the information from all the tasks within it, and this data can be analysed in detail by staff at any time - and from ANY machine on the school network.
From the main screen staff can click on “Produce Summary”. From here staff can filter results of all the assessments / tasks that have been taken and focus on individual pupils, individual classes, individual tasks and assessments, and the dates that they were taken.
When viewing an assessment in detail you can see results of each task within an assessment for each child - and from this quickly highlight any areas that are of concern.
Viewing an individual child’s results over a period of time allows you to view the progression they have made over that period.
So far, we’ve only completed one assessment for each child in each class, but it has highlighted two areas where the children did not perform well. These areas are now going to be the focus of work in the Spring term.
We are seeing the results of using 2Assess already after only a few weeks. Just what will it tell us after a child has spent four years with us?
