So I was speaking to an inspector a few months ago who was trying to look a bit more deeply into my schools maths data. She asked out loud, “couldn’t you make a system that finds out how well children are doing in each individual area of maths, rather than these overall numbers?”
Broadly speaking, that is the problem with data in schools. There’s always the danger of there being so many interpretations and approximations between the numbers that come out of the system and what’s actually in a child’s brain that the data becomes meaningless. Here’s how assessment works:
- we decide what children should be able to do by particularly ages or stages and write it down in sentences.
- we assess how well children can do the things we wrote down.
- we turn those assessments into numbers.
Sometimes those assessments are called tests, at other times they are called observations. Either way it’s more or less the same process. However, quite often as teachers we get distracted and over-focused on the last stage of the process – on the numbers and less on the ‘what the children can actually do’ part of it.
This is where Khan Academy is brilliant. I’ve been using it this term with my Mathemateers group, and even though it doesn’t entirely match with the UK National Curriculum, it does help spot the gaps that children can’t do and provide the children with ways to practice skills that they are still shaky on. I also like the way I can focus the children on a particular skills at a time so that I’m not having to teach each child individually. For example for a few weeks I was focusing on fractions, so I directed children to activities that helped them visualise and practice fractions. I used Google Classroom quite often this – I would post a link in the Google Classroom assignments that would take the children directly to the Khan Academy challenge I wanted them to do.
Why Khan Academy fits in to the inspector’s question is that it gives a brilliant assessment of how children are doing in each area. For example, when setting my fractions challenge I mentioned earlier, I could see that one child had already mastered it, another was struggling at it and the rest had never tried it – it meant I could focus the challenge precisely on what I wanted the children to learn, support the child who was struggling and set a harder challenge for the child who had already mastered it. Ace.