Abstract:

Following a decision to end the licence for a functional skills maths initial assessment that was used at a further education college, the teaching staff were asked to either use an on-line initial assessment or develop their own departmental one. Reflecting both on experiences of using on-line assessment tools and on previous studies, my colleague and I, in the department of adult English and maths, decided that we would design our own assessment. The paper outlines the advantages of paper-based initial assessments over on-line initial assessments, in the wider context of reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of on-line learning. It argues in its rationale that it should assess similar skills that were present in the existing assessment and reflect a comparable scoring mechanism. The paper presents the idea that as well as ascertaining a learner’s level in order to be able to advocate a suitable class for that learner, an initial assessment should be used to gain an understanding of a learner's ability across a range of mathematical skills and knowledge, through providing learners with opportunities to demonstrate methods for solving problems and in so doing provide opportunities for the teacher to observe and analyse those methods. These arguments then formed the basis of the department-based assessment, which was trialed as part of a Bedford College Group research innovation and evaluation fund (BRIEF) study. In the study, learners’ results from the existing initial assessment were compared with the department-based assessment, with a view to replacing the existing initial assessment with the department-based one. The results showed that the learners’ scores obtained in the department-based initial assessment were comparable with those from the current one, within ten percent. The paper concludes that the department-devised initial assessment is a suitable replacement for the existing one on the basis of the comparable results, and due to the rationale outlined.

Keywords:

Initial assessment, maths, on-line learning, methods.