Upgrading an Assessment Tool

Middle school students interested in enrolling and succeeding in the five unit track in high school need a solid base of knowledge, along with thinking skills, strong motivation and the ability to cope with complex problems. In order to strengthen the connections between middle school and high school, and to facilitate a smoother transition between the two stages, nearly two years ago the foundation approved a grant to CET to develop a designated assessment tool (“HighData”). This diagnostic toolkit aims to help mathematics teachers examine and identify the knowledge and thinking skills students learned in middle school.

Today, HighData includes a series of 70 assignments adapted to the curriculum and the PISA mathematics framework. Throughout ninth grade, the diagnostic results provide teachers with a real-time indication of the progress of individual students in the high ability group in mathematics. The assessment kit includes a set of reports and questionnaires which give the teacher and student insights into the abilities and difficulties both in content knowledge and fluency as well as modelling and reasoning skills.

In order for this tool to become part of the teaching routine, each of the grants the foundation allocates for partnerships with local authorities, school networks and development programs, uses HighData as a vehicle for evaluating program success. In addition, to date, fifty teachers have attended a special training, and teachers and students of 83 excellence classes took the tests. Still, HighData is not mandatory as it is used on a voluntary basis, mostly as part of a program using the new learning material that emphasizes real-world, context-based mathematics.

Now, at the end of the COVID-19 year, diagnostics has an immediate role to perform in obtaining a status snapshot of students as they return to school. After a long period of shutdowns of in-school learning and a bumpy transition to home-based self-learning, it is not an obvious assumption that all high ability students are ready for the five unit track. Therefore, CET is now proposing to upgrade the HighData assessment tool, so that it will also offer a rapid-use assessment tool to provide an instant learning status report for ninth grade graduates of the high ability group in mathematics.

The plan is to adapt the tool for self-use via the CET learning management system (“Ofek”). The tool and results will be available to the teachers and students who will receive a simple mapping report reflecting status in a number of knowledge areas and several skill elements. In addition, 150 teachers will receive content and technical support. The foundation has also asked CET and the Maytiv Center to collaborate and integrate questionnaires assessing emotional readiness into this tool. All content will be available in both Hebrew and Arabic. It is expected that 1,500 ninth grade graduates will use the self-assessment tool this coming summer, ahead of their enrolment in 10^th grade.

* The text  above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 434