Pupil Assessment
Baseline assessments were developed in consultation with the groups of teachers who were going to
administer them as we wanted to ensure that they could provide a valid and reliable assessment of pupils’
knowledge, skills and understanding of the subject concerned.
As far as possible, the same tests were given to all the pupils in the subject/KS cohort (mostly around 100 pupils), so that statistical analysis could be carried out even allowing for some reduction in numbers during the period of the study. This was not possible for all cohorts, however, where the age group being taught in the two pairs of schools differed by too much. For maths, the assessment was of a general nature in numeracy as we expected that all the teachers at each level would be covering the topics during the period concerned. In science, the tests were devised to ascertain initial conceptions concerning the specific subject matter to be taught during the period concerned, and in Welsh and MFL the tests contained a mixture of general vocabulary and sentence structure together with specific matters to be taught. The KS1 tests have been multichoice in nature for Science and Welsh, with children using specially printed peel and stick labels to represent their responses. In maths, the pupils have been assessed through use of a ‘bingo’ game approach to responding. In all cases, the tests are designed to have at least 20 marks available in order to provide a scale variable for the analysis.
The scores for different classes were compared using SPSS to apply ANCOVA procedures, using post-test as dependent variable, teacher as independent variable and pre-test as covariate. This analysis explored differences according to whether the teacher used ICT in Phase 1 or not, and whether the teacher was using a predominantly dialogic approach.
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