Assessment, Planning & Progress Monitoring
Alps Connect & Summit
Alps celebrated its 20-year anniversary this summer, an early pioneer in some of the first value added analysis, remaining at the cutting-edge for tracking progression and achievement.
In that 20-year history, Alps has worked with tens of thousands of school leaders, nurturing aspiration for millions of students.
Alps tools have proven invaluable in the last two years of interruption, helping schools with the vital process of determining grades fairly in the face of cancelled examinations. In this period perhaps more than ever it has been imperative that schools and colleges had trend and benchmarked data to help arrive at fair and objective outcomes.
It has been an exciting period of development and transformation for Alps in 2021, launching a rebuilt interface for Alps Connect and an entirely new platform for the MAT and group market, Alps Summit.
Alps Summit is one of the first products of its kind. For senior leaders, trust data managers and MAT executives, Alps Summit is designed to be a hub for swift, actionable insight into performance. Grounded in our philosophy of putting the student at the centre of all that we do, Alps Summit is the next natural step in a 20-year journey for Alps.”
Felser – PAGS (Profile, Assessment and Goal Setting)
Are you working with neurodiverse children? Then you’ll be glad that PAGS was invented.
Parents, teachers and/or professionals fill out PAGS’s 4 proprietary questionnaires, which evaluate the developmental capabilities of a child. This evaluation is both holistic and detailed, with questionnaires looking at 4 key areas of development: cognition, communication, social interaction, and self-regulation. The resulting profile is presented in an intuitive and visual way, so that anyone — regardless of their SEN expertise — is able to understand the strengths and gaps of the child.
PAGS then uses the child’s unique profile to provide intelligent and automated support to each stakeholder. For example, the tool helps caregivers to select relevant learning objectives and to find appropriate exercises/teaching strategies to implement with the child.
Lastly, by being cloud-based, PAGS is a tool that finally brings all these stakeholders together around a single source of truth about the child.”
Knowledge AI – KAIT Solutions
At KAIT, we are trying to change education, change the world, and thereby, change the future of our children. We are striving to make learning easier for students and less burdensome for teachers. In doing so, we must address a critical flaw in the current system: using grades to classify students. Assessments should be integrated as a learning tool instead of as a classification tool. To do this, KAIT developed an automated system with auto grading, an easy feedback loop, and a new way of assessing students, the Understanding Index™.
Through the use of our smart pens to collect digital data, KAIT seamlessly incorporates AI into conventional classroom learning. Biometric data such as thinking time, stroke count and writing speed are used in conjunction with a proprietary algorithm such as the Understanding Index™ and Cognitive and Behavioral Metrics™, we improve learning for each student using AI.”
Learning Ladders
Learning Ladders provides assessment that goes way beyond tracking to effectively support teaching and learning for EYFS, Primary, and Secondary settings. Curriculum management tools support SLT with whichever curricula they use, in any language. Data analysis for school leaders incorporates formative assessment, summative assessment, and GL assessments to give a well-rounded picture of every child alongside whole school and vulnerable group
summaries. A wealth of high-quality resources are linked to objectives, including BBC Bitesize, Developing Experts, and Oak National Academy, giving teachers everything they need for lesson planning. Self-marking homework saves teacher workload and contributes towards the personal learning journey for every pupil. Parental engagement is enhanced through the Parent Portal with teacher-written articles across the core curriculum to further support learning past the classroom. The child is at the centre with Learning Ladders, with all stakeholders
involved and supported to facilitate meaningful conversations around learning.”
Renaissance – Star Assessments
Renaissance Star Assessments are low-stake, 20-minute tests in reading and maths. The data they provide allows educators to assess the ability levels of all students, plan differentiated learning journeys for each student based on their current knowledge, and measure the impact of their instruction through progress monitoring. The assessments work on any device with internet access and are very simple to administer.
Star Assessments are computer-adaptive and run on a single scale from Year 1 to Year 13, which means that they can be taken by any school student of any ability. They can be used, for example, Trust-wide by both primary and secondary schools and the data can then be collected and analysed centrally with ease, either through simple extracts, bespoke reporting, or through the new trust-level data analytics dashboard, Schoolzilla.
Star Assessments use country-wide norms which are regularly updated, giving a ready-made expectation of typical progress, and access throughout the year to reliable age-related expectations. Renaissance’s partnership with the National Foundation of Educational Research (NFER) has led to the creation of empirically-valid learning progressions, meaning that Star can accurately assess a student’s understanding of National Curriculum domains and indicate which skills they are ready to learn next.
Rising Stars – Shine Targeted Interventions
Shine targeted interventions are a 3-step solution designed to help teachers seamlessly assess understanding, identify knowledge gaps and deliver targeted individual and group intervention activities for the areas of difficulty identified in their pupils’ diagnostic test results. Shine targeted interventions are available for GPS, Reading and Maths.
South West Grid for Learning – ProjectEVOLVE
ProjectEVOLVE is a free digital literacy toolkit that supports online development and wellbeing in children and young people It assists professionals in educating, guiding, and supporting them through their use of technology in their online life. It establishes some of the fundamental building blocks around the right sort of education needed for their online development and wellbeing.
As part of the toolkit, ProjectEVOLVE includes features that can support professionals with identifying gaps in their students’ understanding of essential online topics and assessing progress with the material.
Professionals have free access to hours of teaching resources and activities The toolkit can be used within planning or as part of live classroom teaching The flexible nature of the toolkit means that professionals can use it however they see fit in spreading awareness around online safety and digital wellbeing.
The material is fun and engaging, encouraging classrooms to open discussions around common online scenarios whilst actively gathering data to illustrate progress and where more understanding is needed The free toolkit will always offer support to those who need it.
Turnitin – Gradescope by Turnitin
Gradescope helps educators build, administer, organise, grade, and report on assessments and assignments. Gradescope works across all subjects and assessment types, including paper-based, digital, and code. The platform helps cut grading time in half and eases the pressures of growing classroom sizes by digitizing hand-written work and improving learning, efficiency, fairness, and scalability.
Students submit their digital and paper-based assessments and assignments by responding directly in Gradescope, uploading paper scans, or uploading photos snapped from their smartphones. Then, AI auto-groups similar responses so that instructors can quickly grade and give feedback on a group of answers at once. Using the dynamic rubric, instructors can adjust scales as they grade and automatically apply new rules to already graded assignments. Graders have the option to hide student-identifying information for fairer evaluation. This helps produce higher quality and consistent feedback at scale.
Gradescope helps show a clear picture of performance—transforming grading into opportunities for growth. Leveraging robust statistics, instructors can identify student and class trends and use these findings to inform future instruction to improve learning outcomes.
Globally, over 110,000 educators from 2,600 universities and colleges use Gradescope to maximise learning efficiency and effectiveness.
Gradescope.com
