What are EdPlace catch-up assessments?

The launch of our catch-up dynamic assessments has been planned to support you and your child as they return to school in September 2020 and moving forwards. We know the last academic year was a particularly challenging time for parents, teachers, and students alike, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

These catch-up assessments provide you with clear visibility on the National Curriculum areas from your child’s last academic year that they excelled in, as well as highlighting any areas where they need to brush up their skills. Catch-up assessments provide you with all the tools you need to identify, and then help your child close, any learning gaps. There’s never been a more important time to have a really clear understanding of your child’s current academic knowledge and needs. 

What is a dynamic assessment?

Dynamic assessments are a new form of assessment launched by EdPlace in September 2020. They’re short, timed assessments created to provide full visibility of progress at, and towards, specific milestones in your child’s educational journey.  

Dynamic assessments can be undertaken multiple times, as the questions change each time, removing any chance that a child can ‘remember’ the answers and, therefore, increasing the validity of the results. Upon completion of an EdPlace dynamic assessment, you will be provided with a PDF report, which highlights areas of strength in your child’s understanding and areas requiring further focus and intervention. The dynamic assessments are an excellent entry point to get started with EdPlace by identifying great activities and skills for your child to target. 

How do I know the assessment will cover what my child should know?

Each dynamic assessment is aligned to the National Curriculum requirements of a chosen subject and age group, meaning that after a short, pain-free assessment you’ll gain all the insight you need to best help your child progress in their current school year.

 As always at EdPlace, all our assessments have been created by subject-specialist, qualified teachers with a minimum of five years’ classroom experience. Who is better placed than a teacher to support you in identifying what your child does and doesn’t know?

How do I know what my child should focus on after the assessment?

Once your child has completed a dynamic assessment you will automatically be sent a report of their results via email. There’s also a copy available of this in the parent account, to be found under the ‘Review Completed’ section:

The report shows your child’s overall score for the year and subject they have undertaken, before breaking down their results by National Curriculum Objective with a visual and numerical representation in the ‘Summary of Performance’:

To watch a video on how to access and understand the PDF report, please click here. 

What’s next, once I know which areas my child needs more help with?

After reading the report and seeing the National Curriculum areas your child needs to brush up on, we have the next step covered too!  With the help of EdPlace’s short National Curriculum aligned activities, you can create personalised practice tailored to your child’s needs. Simply assign activities within the National Curriculum area identified for focus and watch your child’s confidence improve. Click here to watch a video on how to do this.

How do I know this approach works?

The beauty of the dynamic assessment is that they can be re-used at any point and the questions will change each time, therefore you are always getting an accurate picture of your child’s progress across all areas of the National Curriculum, without the risk of memorisation or rote learning coming into play.  After a period of time, why not get your child to complete the dynamic assessment again and compare the results of the two assessments?  We’ll be sending email reminders to re-test too, as we want you to be able to assess the progress made. We’re confident that through our comprehensive resources you’ll have all the tools at your disposal to really support your child reach their full potential.

What next? 

If you are ready for your child to try one of our catch-up assessments, please click here to watch a video on how to find and assign them. As these assessments are dynamic and change each time they are attempted, your child can repeat the same assessment whenever you would like so that you can compare their two scores. Here at EdPlace, we recommend that your child repeats the same assessment once a term as a minimum so that you can check they are on track with their catch up progress.

If they score highly (more than 85%) within the time limit on their first attempt, they will be best suited to try the assessment in the same subject from the next year up. This will focus on what they will need to learn in their current school year rather than catching up on any missed learning from last year. 

If you have any questions about our catch-up assessments or you need any other help at all, please contact our friendly Customer Support Team via email at help@edplace.com.