Why use EdPlace assessments?

Getting an impartial and objective insight into which topics really pose as the achilles heel and which ones have actually been grasped, despite what students may think is invaluable. There’s often some disparity between these two things. That’s why we created the assessments part of our website. 

Our assessments are medium length activities which are automatically marked and cover the full spectrum of National Curriculum topics for each core subject and year group.  They’re written by fully qualified teachers who are used to putting students through their paces, so you can be confident that they will give an accurate picture of student understanding.

We know keeping track of student progress can be a challenging thing, and this is why on completion of each of our assessments a handy, downloadable PDF report is automatically generated and can be saved for later use. Finally, it’s worth noting that you can complete any of the assessments on our site as many times as you see fit. While the topics tested will remain the same each time, allowing you to compare the results, the questions themselves will change each time, removing any chance of students rote learning the answers and invalidating the results.

We currently have 3 different assessments for each core subject and year group and our intention is to keep adding to these over time.

These are:

• Combined Subject Assessments 
• Termly Benchmark Assessments
• Catch-Up Assessments

Combined Assessments

These assessments do exactly what they say on the tin, combining all 3 core subjects, English, maths and science within one assessment. They are 30 questions in length, with 10 questions from each subject and take roughly 15 minutes to complete. The range of questions within each subject spans the covered National Curriculum objectives, giving you a ‘big picture’ view of how students' understanding of the three subjects stack up against one another.

We recommend completing this type of assessment at the start of your journey with EdPlace to allow you to tailor all following work to a student's specific needs.  We also strongly recommend that once the subject requiring the most support has been identified, students should then complete the specific subject assessments to get a much more in depth understanding of topic level knowledge.  From here, you can use the thousands of activities on our site, all organised by National Curriculum objective to begin your intervention.  
 

Termly Benchmark Assessments

One of the biggest challenges in the academic year is understanding whether students are on track to make expected progress and knowing how to support them if they are falling a little behind.  Our termly benchmarks have been created to do just this, and help support you in keeping track of this as the year progresses.  

By using these termly benchmarks as a check-in at the end of each academic term, you can be sure that you increase your visibility on overall student progress.  The topics and the questions covered in these assessments reflect the types of questions that students would cover in each of the three terms of the year.  These assessments vary in length in accordance with the age of the student (for example 20 questions in KS1, 30 in KS2 and 40 in KS3) and therefore we recommend it should take between 10 (KS1), 15 (KS2) or 20 (KS4) minutes to complete.  The timer is there to offer further insight into student performance but will not play any other role in the assessment.  Students will not be locked out or activities closed if they exceed the expected time.
 

Catch-Up Assessments

These assessments were first introduced in response to the school closures to help offer a way to understand current levels of understanding.  They test the expected understanding of the full range of National Curriculum topics for the academic year below the one in which they are found i.e. Year 3 is based on what students should know by the end of Year 2.  

These assessments proved so popular that they are being used as part of the National Tutoring Programme, a government funded programme to combat the learning deficit caused by the school closures.  However, catch-up may be required at any point in a student's academic journey, and so these assessments are there to help with this, or even to help boost confidence levels along the way.  Like the termly benchmarks these assessments vary in length, 20 questions at KS1, 30 at KS2 and 40 at KS3.