From Katie Blainey, Publishing Director, RS Assessment from Hodder Education
Thousands of primary schools are now using PiRA and PUMA to get rich termly data that highlights pupils’ strengths and weaknesses, which helps support tailored teaching and learning throughout primary school years. In the last few years MARK (My Assessment and Reporting Kit) has become an increasingly popular support for schools to enter their test results and quickly analyse data for pupils, classes and the whole school. As the number of results in the MARK database increased we wanted to see if any trends were emerging at an aggregated level, as we know large data sets of this size are rare.
The majority of studies of primary school trends use the National Test results which are limited to two discrete points (year 2 and 6), whereas PIRA and PUMA are used termly throughout Reception to Year 6, giving a unique viewpoint, plus the data is very up to date (running up to summer 2018).
We have been working with Timo Hannay, founder of SchoolDash, an expert in data analysis in education to analyse the aggregated data set. The insights and analysis from this data will allow us to tailor our resources and solutions to address the data-driven issues we are uncovering. We intend to build on this analysis to provide further insight for schools and educationalists to use to continue to improve the chances for all children in primary education.
Read the the full whitepaper at here.