Saturday, 18 July 2015

Improve.edu.au

Our unit leader and I have been trialling combining our classes in Mathematics so that groups who need consolidation get the extra exposure to course material that they need, and those who need stretching can zoom out with lateral extension tasks.In order to give students who need extension extra room to show us what they can do, we've started using Improve as an addendum to the available Mathletics topic pre-tests (Are You Ready?) and post-tests (Test) that we'd been using to group and benchmark students.

Improve is accessible to teachers working for most states and territories using your Scootle username and password. Teachers can set up tests from a question bank, added to and edited by teachers from around the country. You can share your tests with your colleagues if you have their email address, so that if like us you are comparing cohort results you have a common platform from which to do so. The report on results from each test (pre and post) is presented as a graph so you can easily see the average from each test, the improvement each student has made, etc.

improve graph
Awesome easy-to-interpret graph representation of results

Students sit the pre-test using a password and test PIN, answering the questions and also rating how confident they are about the answer they've given. They then have activities assigned to them based on their results, then take the post test after they've finished them. The activities are pulled from a number of different websites, including the NLVM, and the students love them (especially the jigsaw ones where they have to solve problems to remove pieces of a puzzle to reveal a picture!).

A few small flaws, one of which I have given feedback about already - if a child accidentally presses 'take the test again' (to take the post-test) after finishing the activities and then clicks back, they get zero, and there's no way to just re-set the test for them without erasing the class' data and completed activities and re-setting the whole unit for everyone. In this day and age, with differentiated learning as highly-thought-after as it is, I don't think you can afford not to have this function built in.

It's a good add-on to other online assessment methods, and we'll continue to use it while we are streaming our classes. Another great benefit to having access to Scootle!

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