End of Year Report - Term 3 - Mr Chadwick

​Dear Parents

EDUCATIONAL SCREENING FOR ALL STUDENTS IN P3-P6
PART 1
Promoting children’s learning is a principal aim at The French International School. We believe that assessment lies at the heart of this process and that it provides a framework in which educational objectives may be set and pupils progress charted.
The French International School accepts students from many different nations and backgrounds on a selective basis. During the last school year over many new students joined us, each bringing with them different social and educational experiences, levels of ability, attainments etc. The class teacher’s task in determining each child’s individual educational needs is onerous and time consuming. This form of screening and testing is designed to make that task both easier and more effective.
The debate about the effectiveness of schools is now influencing educators and parents in many parts of the world. The ‘Value added’ teaching approach is to measure the child’s educational attainments and ability on intake and throughout the year and to use this as a baseline for measuring educational outcomes. This is the fairest way to measure whether a school is offering an effective education to its’ pupils, although it is important to emphasise that a very good school like ours offers very much more than a good grounding in numeracy and literacy.
 What does the Educational screening involve?
In addition to the pupils previous educational records [ information on each student will be gathered from three main sources:
• The enrolment forms that all parents are asked to complete.
• Objective standardized or criterion referenced tests for every Key Stage 2 school pupil at F.I.S.
• Teacher’s observations of the strengths and needs of the students in their class.
 What are the reasons for Educational screening?
Educational screening of pupils is designed to:
• Provide an objective measure of each child’s basic educational attainment and level of ability.
• Enable teachers and parents to gain a clearer view of their child’s educational needs.
• Provide important information for teachers in designing a relevant educational programme for their students as required.
• Provide information for a school data base.
What screening will be going on in our School?
This year we shall be using:
• The GL Assessment/N.F.E.R. Verbal Reasoning test
• The GL Assessment/N.F.E.R. Non-Verbal Reasoning test
 What are these tests about?
The Non-Verbal Reasoning test is a test of the ability to recognise similarities, analogies and patterns in unfamiliar designs. These reasoning processes are widely accepted as being fundamental to pupil’s ability to understand and assimilate new information and ideas. Scores on this test will give an indication of how easily pupils acquire new concepts and master new materials in a wide range of school subjects based on current levels of functioning. Using designs rather than words allows reasoning processes to be assessed independently of language skills.
 The Verbal Reasoning test provides very useful information about pupil’s abilities that might not be evident from their usual classwork. The ability to understand and assimilate new and possibly unfamiliar information is very important, as it will influence profoundly a pupil’s intellectual development. The test results can be used to enhance the teacher’s knowledge of the pupils in the classroom and to inform on teaching strategies.
 In order to relate a pupil’s score to those obtained from a large “national” sample, the most useful measure that may be derived from the test is the standardized score. A pupil’s standardized score depends upon his or her ‘raw score’ the number of questions answered correctly, plus the pupil’s age. The teacher finds the standardized score by locating the pupil’s raw score on the appropriate chart and then reads across the row to the column for the pupil’s age. The intersection of the appropriate row and column gives the pupil’s standardized score.
‘We use our powers of reasoning to make sense of patterns of words and shapes and the ability to process such information is fundamental to intellectual development. Measures of this have been shown to be valid predictors of future academic performances verbal and non-verbal reasoning teats are therefore, very effective ways of assessing a pupil’s potential’.
 This year, for the first time as we are going more green, we will be using On-line assessments rather than the printed paper booklets. This is all very new for my teachers and I we have recently had training sessions to make us familiar with the methods and materials as well as training in how to manage the sessions; everything will now be done in the IT suite and not the classroom. I hope this has provided you with the enough information so that you can understand your child’s results and to see that in the future of things at F.I.S. that they are important to us all.
 Interpreting and Reporting Test Results
 Using  Standardized scores enable you to compare your own pupils with a standardized  large, nationally representative sample that has taken the test prio to publication. Previously, it was stated that standardized scores are more useful measures than raw scores. There are three reasons why such scores are normally used.
 1. In order to place pupils’ scores on a readily understandable scale
 One way to make test scores such as 25 out of 42 on this test and 32 out Of 65 on NFER -NELSON Verbal Reasoning 8 & 9 more readily understandable and comparable would be to convert them to percentages (60 per cent and 49 per cent, to the nearest whole number). However, these percentages on their own do not tell us (a) the average score of all the pupils, or (b) how spread out the scores are. On the other hand, standardized scores do. Usually, tests are standardized so that the average, nationally standardized score automatically comes out as 100, irrespective of the difficulty of the test, and so it is easy to see whether a pupil is above or below the national average.
The measure of the spread of scores is called the ‘standard deviation’, and this is usually set to 15 for educational attainment and ability tests. This means that, for example, irrespective of the difficulty of the test, about 68 per cent of the pupils in the national sample will have a standardized score within 15 points of the avenge (between 85 and 115) and about 95 per cent will have a standardized score within two standard deviations (30 points) of the average (between 70 and 130). These examples come from a frequency distribution known as ‘the normal distribution’, which is shown in Figure 1.
 2. So that an allowance can be made for the different ages of the pupils
 In a typical class, it is usual that most pupils are born between 1st September in one year and 31St August of the following year, which means that the oldest pupils are very nearly 12 months older than the youngest. Almost invariably in ability tests taken in the primary and early secondary years older pupils achieve slightly higher raw scores than younger pupils. However, standardized scores are derived in such a way that the ages of the pupils are taken into account by comparing a pupil only with others of the same age (in years and months). An older pupil may in fact gain a higher raw score thana younger pupil, but have a lower standardized score. This is because the older pupil is being compared with other older pupils in his reference graph.
Interpreting and Reporting Test Results
 Figure as shown above: The normal distribution showing the relationships of standard deviations, standardized scores and percentile ranks.
 reference group, and has a lower performance relative to his or her own a group.
3. So that scores from more than one test can be meaningfully’ compared or added together
Standardized scores from most educational tests cover the same range from 70 to 140. Hence a pupil’s standing in, say, mathematics and reading comprehension can be
compared directly using standardized scores. Similarly, should you wish to add together scores from more than one test, they can be meaningfully combined if standardized scores are used, whereas it is not meaningful to add together raw scores from tests of different length or difficulty.
4. MINDSETS:  Language conveys mindsets, use the word yet  !
​“Yet” is a power growth mindset word, it infers that brains develop and grow and that others have faith in their ability to learn and we expect them to.
 

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