How We Use Diagnostic Assessments to Pinpoint Learning Loss
A diagnostic assessment is a set of questions that assess a learner’s current knowledge base on a particular subject. Collecting data on what a student knows or doesn’t yet know is an important part of how teachers target specific learning gaps and avoid repeating teaching information the student may have already learned.
There are many ways to administer diagnostics, and our teachers and tutors are constantly assessing their students’ strengths and challenge areas more informally (by asking “check for understanding” questions at the beginning of each lesson or asking students to complete practice problems). However, we also have available more formal diagnostic assessments for gathering baseline data on K-8 math and English Language Arts (ELA), which come with reports that outline potential learning gaps and suggested learning objectives based on the results.
Please read the following to learn more about what’s included in these reports, and how our tutors and teachers use the data collected in them to individualize their academic support for their students.
What we do & how we do it
Our K-8 math and ELA diagnostics each take an hour to complete and are extremely interactive, including both qualitative and quantitative elements. They are administered live (online) with a trained teacher, who works through a series of leveled questions that provide a snapshot of the student’s understanding of key concepts a student of that age/grade level is expected to know.
This is not a rote, multiple-choice test. Our assessments do not feel like tests to the students when they’re administered because teachers do such a great job of engaging their kids in the material, and they have been trained to make the process both informative and fun. This also avoids the pitfall of students with specific learning differences potentially answering questions incorrectly they might actually know because we’re able to be dynamic in our administrative procedures and shift the way the question is asked based on that student’s particular learning needs.
That being said, it’s important to understand that these are purely academic assessments and will not provide data on whether the student might be experiencing additional difficulties due to underlying learning challenges. For those kinds of assessments, parents need to seek out more comprehensive assessments conducted by a trained & credentialed neurospsychologist.
What’s in our reports
After a student has completed the diagnostic, the teacher or tutor who administered the material will write up a report that is provided to parents and any teacher or tutor who will be working with the student, based on request.
You can find a sample math report here and a sample ELA report here.
What’s included:
Strengths
Areas for growth
Next steps/recommendations
What’s not included:
Learning differences assessments
Every single academic topic (we focus on broad strokes)
Graphs and charts
Our reports contain strengths, areas for growth, and next steps/recommendations for students.
How tutors and teachers utilize reports to inform their academic support
Mainly teachers and tutors will utilize the reports to direct priorities in their session time with students. They will plan their teaching time to build on strengths and help push students to the next level when it comes to topics where they shine, and fill gaps where students have room for growth.
For example, in the report clip featured above, the teacher has assessed that the student is at roughly a B or C level when it comes to reading, which means the teacher would target lesson to solidify learning in the B and C levels, and then potentially take the student to a D level in reading, depending on the time and scope of the tutoring arrangement.
Conclusion
Experienced teachers will never assume a student understands class material before first asking them to demonstrate some form of mastery. This is why diagnostic assessments are so important: they provide teachers with a baseline for what the student has mastered before delving into creating learning objectives and lessons to support those objectives.
Have questions or want to learn more? Reach out to us at info@tutorcorps.com.