UPDATE: This function now also includes the KS2 SATs papers too which may be useful for year 7.

Using QLAs seems to regularly come into and out of fashion but it is something that we have always used … however we also had reservations in that it’s not enough to just point out topics / subtopics that students couldn’t answer at some point in their assessment … some form of follow up action needs to take place. Before the technology allowed us to do so, we would always follow up with some form of remedial action but it was a massive pain in the bum and then a few years ago we came up with the idea of RAG papers. We call them this because they colour code questions on the front page red, amber or green … ingenius I know! 

 

Essentially, the idea is all around providing support to help students to correct/hone/refine their work having done an assessment – as practising teachers we know how busy everyone is so wanted to keep our solution simple – we wanted something that got students focused on improving their raw score without adding to teacher workload. I suppose we also wanted to pass some of the responsibility back to students and parents … give them the tools to help themselves.

 

This function essentially generates alternative questions testing EXACTLY the same skill as the original one on the test they sat (and not a question from a load of others that were flagged as, say, also being “Pythagoras” if that’s what the original question was about … after all, it could be testing a totally different skill too) from a set of three possible alternatives so effectively all your students could end up with totally different papers. There is also the ability to exclude any questions that they “nailed” if you wished – the idea is that students can focus and hone in on topics that in the first instance, they know something about (i.e. the amber questions) and then the ones that they didn’t get any marks on (i.e. the red questions). The new paper also includes video support so we don’t get the “I don’t know how to do it” excuse and worked solutions (along with the ability to do multi-student upload). 

 

 

Seager and I have used these in totally different ways:

  • I multi-uploaded (I did each class seperately to keep track of who I had and hadn’t done) the data from a paper my students had done and got them emailed to myself and I then forwarded to the students (AND PARENTS … Parents in particular love these) . We could have got them emailed direct to students instead but I wanted to include a message.  If I am really organised I print the students a copy too and they can view the worked solutions and access the video support through the electronic copy on their email.
  • Seager took his group to an IT room and got them to input their own scores and generate their own papers. I like this idea because it means that they can know how to do it themselves in future (if permitted they could do it sitting in the maths classrooms through their phones). He then got them to print copies so that they had something to work on too.

I do hope that people will find this function useful and if you do use it we’d love to hear how it goes for you.