This article explores effective strategies to support maths assessment, particularly how Essential Assessment (EA) can enhance school summative and formative assessment practices.
What is assessment?
The term ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin verb ‘asserde,’ which means ‘to sit beside’. This concept involves educators actively engaging with learners, sharing ideas, and supporting their educational journeys. Swaffield (2009) states, ‘By sitting beside, literally or metaphorically, teachers gather evidence, interpret it, and provide information about what the students have learned, how successful their teaching has been, and what to do next.’
Recognising and valuing achievement encourages students to take responsibility for directing and regulating their own learning. This transformative process reshapes the traditional roles of teachers and students, changing the dynamics within the classroom. Assessment is an ongoing process that involves gathering, analysing, and interpreting evidence, reflecting on findings, and making informed judgments to enhance student learning.
Types of assessment
Classroom assessments serve various purposes, such as providing feedback and support for students, collecting diagnostic information for planning and decision-making, and maintaining records of student activity for parents and administrators. These purposes can be broadly categorised into:
- Assessment for learning (Formative assessment): This approach emphasises a descriptive process that shifts the focus from summative to formative assessment. It acknowledges students’ understanding, diagnoses misunderstandings, and informs decisions about the next steps in learning. Assessment as Learning, a subset of this type, aims to develop students’ cognitive skills by fostering self-reflection and goal monitoring.
- Assessment of learning (Summative assessment): This type summarises student achievement and growth, helps categorise students into relative performance groups, and provides reportable symbols or curriculum levels to inform students, parents, and administrators about performance.
How we support teaching Primary maths
Essential Assessment combines summative and formative assessment approaches within each Primary curriculum in Australia for Mathematics.
For summative assessment, EA offers online and printable pre- and post-assessments for specific curriculum strands and focus areas. For formative assessment, you can use My Numeracy and our two learning apps—Sunset Maths and Jetpack Algebra—to continually gather data on student learning. My Numeracy tasks are pre-populated with student profiles, and after pre-assessment, any misunderstandings lead to the creation of individualised learning goals. This approach helps students master the curriculum content.
My Numeracy tasks play a critical role in tracking student learning. When aligned with classroom teaching and pre-assessment data, they can significantly impact learning growth. This impact is maximised when teachers assign tasks to the whole class or small groups, allowing students to track their learning progress using feedback alongside their individual learning goals.
Sunset Maths focuses on mental math applications, covering the four basic operations: finance, measurement, and capacity. Students can engage with Sunset Maths to answer questions before the virtual sunset, promoting active learning.
Jetpack Algebra offers a fun, engaging environment where students can master algebraic skills using efficient strategies.
Essential Assessment aims to provide you with a robust point of data triangulation that supports other assessment methods and data collection, giving a complete picture of student progress and achievement. By ‘sitting beside’ our learners, we can help every child reach and exceed their potential in Mathematics while building lifelong numeracy skills.
If you’d like to incorporate our numeracy assessments and resources into your school, please click here to try EA and experience the impact we can make.
