Formative assessment at its best

  • Enables reliable teacher judgements
  • Values teacher judgements
  • Covers a range of curriculum areas
  • Based on real classroom tasks
How Brightpath works Watch on YouTube

Transcript for: How Brightpath works

Welcome to Brightpath, the leading edge in educational assessment. Brightpath is based on internationally recognized research conducted by the University of Western Australia and provides an advanced process to streamline and enhance the assessment of students. Not only is Brightpath a great tool for school evaluation, it also develops teachers assessment skills and enables them to better differentiate student learning.

Brightpath’s operation is very straightforward and requires minimal training to begin.

This is how the assessment module works: in the centre is the Brightpath Narrative Teachers Ruler. Alongside and on the left, are calibrated exemplars. These are shown as little thumbnails. To the far left, you can see one of the thumbnails which has been enlarged. As you can see on the right, a teacher has already uploaded their student’s work and this one is ready to be assessed.

You drag the slider up and down to view the exemplars as you move along the scale. If you click on a sample of work it enlarges for you to read it more clearly.

Here we can see a teacher assessing their students work. They’ve read their students story, now they’re comparing it to the calibrated exemplars and descriptors. Teachers need to be familiar with the exemplars and descriptors before they score the students work. The process is straightforward: teachers match their student’s work to one of the calibrated exemplars.

Once satisfied with their judgement they click the ’score’ button. This saves the score and the next student’s work sample is presented ready to be assessed.

If a teacher chooses not to scan in student work, they’re able to work from hard copies and score them on the teachers ruler in the normal way.

As teachers score their students, the scores are captured automatically in the reports which teachers can access straight away. They can see their students score on the Brightpath scale. They can also open their students work and review they’re marking.

Brightpath also features impressive reporting capabilities making possible many levels of comparison. Teachers can see how their students performed relative to the performance of students in other year levels. They can also see the progress a student has made from one time of testing to the next. And, the whole school can compare its performance to the performance of other schools.

We now invite you to listen to what school leaders and teachers are saying about Brightpath.

What school leaders and teachers are saying about Brightpath

  • A breakthrough in the assessment of students and evaluation of teaching programs Watch on YouTube

    Transcript for: A breakthrough in the assessment of students and evaluation of teaching programs

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: Teachers are leading this now, it’s teachers saying we need this, this is really good stuff.

    Jenny Dougan, Head of Junior School, Perth College: We can see that we’re growing and improving, we can see that we’re taking the kids to the next level.

    Richard Deck, Teacher, St Stephen’s School: It’s definitely maybe a better teacher because I can be much more targeted in what I’m actually teaching the students for their writing.

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: Once your teachers use it and see the benefits from it, they get excited.

    Kerry Miller, Teacher, Lesmurdie Primary School: I find this really exciting because it’s the next step forward for us.

    Stephen Breen, President, WA Primary Principals’ Association: Brightpath has a number of pluses for us. The first one, it will give the teacher direct information. The second thing, it will show the teacher what to teach next—the “so what”. Importantly, for a leadership professional association, it will give the principal, the deputy principal, the school leader, clear information about what’s happening in the school, in that classroom, but also clear information what’s happening over the whole school.

    Mathilda Joubert, Education Consultant, Swan Christian Education Association: Brightpath could be a turning point in education because we’ve got lots of metrics that can help us measure student attainment. What Brightpath can do for us has helped us to measure student progress. Because it’s got a continuous scale right across the age ranges and that’s really the holy grail for us an education: how can we demonstrate that every child is making a years’ progress for years’ learning.

    Lynda Fisher, Head of Carmel Primary and President of IPSHA WA: What some of my staff said to me afterwards was I really know now how to differentiate in my classroom. I’ve got the tools, the structures, and the data to support me honoring the learning pathway of my students.

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: This is powerful information and you know, the profession of the whole, don’t, don’t really understand yet the true value of Brightpath at this at this point in time. This is this is going to lead to so much more growth in teaching and learning than we’ve ever seen before.

    Kerry Hill, Literacy Co-ordinator, Charthouse Primary School: In terms of talking with parents, we can really target the feedback we give them when we’re confident that we know where their child is at and we can give them feedback that’s going to help their child move forward.

    Unidentified: I love the fact that it’s based on teacher judgments and that we are part of the process.

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: We know that teachers make sound judgments, so it’s actually giving them far more confidence in their teaching ability but also in their assessment ability and that’s hugely valuable to a teacher.I had one year-six teachers say to me, he thought he was a good teacher before he started using Brightpath. Now he’s using Brightpath, he said, I’ve learned so much, I’m such a better teacher now because I’ve got far more knowledge behind what I’m doing and why. I think that’s pretty powerful powerful information for a teacher.

  • School leaders share their experiences using Brightpath Watch on YouTube

    Transcript for: School leaders share their exeperiences with using Brightpath

    Lynda Fisher, Head of Carmel Primary and President of IPSHA WA: I could see the validity in it and I knew the people who created Brightpath knew what they were doing. They understood the pitfalls of NAPLAN and other testing regimes that people have run, and they knew the challenges that a lack of ownership in data could bring into a school.

    Jenny Dougan, Head of Junior School, Perth College: So I think for staff, the penny dropped when they got their data back from the first assessment they’ve done, and they could see where every child in their class was in relation to that ruler. They could see the strengths of the children in their class and they could see where to take each child next.

    Mathilda Joubert, Education Consultant, Swan Christian Education Association: It makes the progress in learning and the particular next steps in learning really visible. Brightpath helps the teachers to identify exactly what the next teaching points for every student is. We can feed that back to the parents, we can feed that back to the child, and the teacher can use that information to adapt their instruction according to the needs of every child in the class.

    Lynda Fisher, Head of Carmel Primary and President of IPSHA WA: They immediately saw “Wow, look at this. My students are falling onto this teacher ruler, I can see where everybody’s placed, and I can determine now, how I’m going to use that data.”

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: One comment from one teacher said, “I thought I taught you know narrative pretty well”, and he said, “but once I started using Brightpath, I actually couldn’t believe how much I needed to actually teach my students”. He said, “there was things there that I didn’t realize the level of detail that I needed to go until I saw Brightpath.” And that’s why I feel this is “in the moment” professional development for our teachers too.

    Mathilda Joubert, Education Consultant, Swan Christian Education Association: The exciting things for me, the turnarounds that have come for me, is from teachers stepping out in confidence, knowing that they are teaching at the point of need for every child. The ability that Brightpaths gives us to differentiate student learning is really amazing. And so often we find that our teachers teach to the middle of the class, or teach to the standard curriculum for the year, which sometimes misses the needs of some of the students perhaps lower down or higher up the ability scale. Now Brightpath helps them to identify exactly what the point of need for every child is. And that has really been the exceptional turnaround for our teachers, where they could say “Wow, if I teach the standard middle curriculum for this child, that child won’t learn anything, or for this child they won’t learn anything. We really can tailor-make the learning based on the data we get back from Brightpath”

    Lynda Fisher, Head of Carmel Primary and President of IPSHA WA: As a school policy, I insisted that they all use the data and they needed to use it to generate a teaching learning program. Because the beauty of Brightpath is that it gives you an assessment of your learning and teaching, and then it gives you the pathway forward for teaching and learning.

    Jenny Dougan, Head of Junior School, Perth College: And then of course when we did the second assessment at the end of the year, and the data came back again, and they could see the growth and they could communicate that growth to each other and to the students, that was another moment when “Wow, this validates what we’ve been doing has actually had an impact on learning.” And for us that’s important for every teacher, but it’s really important for us as a visible learning school, or a school engaging with visible learning, that we actually know our impact. That’s that’s one of the key phrases of visible learning, and this enables us to know our impact in a very clear and obvious way. We can see it, the students particularly those that the audio levels can see it, and if we wanted to we could communicate it to parents in that way too.

  • Using Brightpath to improve student learning Watch on YouTube

    Transcript for: Using Brightpath to improve student learning

    Tracey Gray,Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: The conversation in the staff room among teachers is really exciting now. Took a little while for teachers to figure out what Brightpath was for them and what it would enable them to do. Now, teachers are excited about it and now they’re able to say “I know exactly how to teach my students what they need to know to get them to the next level.”

    Lynda Fisher, Head of Carmel Primary and President of IPSHA WA: You take a sample of exemplars that you run throughout the school, a sample of work that they are working on, and you say to them “I’m going to give you the time to sit in school, discuss these samples with your colleagues, with your professional learning team, and you’re going to then look at how your own school samples rate with the exemplars that underpin the teachers ruler.” Giving them that, they immediately saw “Wow, look at this, my students are falling onto this teacher ruler. I can see where everybody’s placed and I can determine now, how I’m going to use that data.”

    Richard Deck, Teacher, St Stephen’s School: When you first start using Brightpath, you get into a piece of writing, and as a teacher you read through it, and you look at it then you compare it to lots of other examples of writing, and then from that you score your students, and then from that you can see where how they’re distributed across the cohort. And all that stuff I guess is helpful and useful, but personally for a classroom teacher, I don’t really care so much where my kids, you know, how they’re distributed across a big range, what I more care about is, well, then what can I do to help the individual kids move and progress and grow. So, there’s the teaching points tab in Brightpath, you click on that, and it shows and what the students need to be targeted and they need to be explicitly taught to better move to progress to the next stage of that particular writing genre.

    I was thinking about how am I going to get the students to actually know this. So I actually screenshotted the teaching points, and I made up sheets for each student with all the teaching points that they needed to work on, and I gave it to them. I think it was nice to have that guided writing kind of experience where there was maybe two or three students had the same teaching points that I’ve got from Brightpath, got them together, read through their bits of work, discuss what was great about them, what some the teaching points were, and we just picked one of those things and worked on it. And that’s what we worked on for a couple of weeks with some of the students. They certainly improve their writing because of it. I think it was probably some of the most valuable explicit writing sessions we’ve had all year by using this information.

    Tracey Gray, Head of Primary, St Stephen’s School: We want our students to be able to set their own goals, so by understanding where they’re up to and understanding what you’ve got to teach them next, means there’s information we can share with students. Students want to get better at what they’re doing, so now, we actually have tangible ways to be able to say “this is what you need to do”, so kids can set their own goals. That’s really exciting!”

About Brightpath

Brightpath is based on over a decade of pioneering research at the University of Western Australia.

The software records the results of assessments and reports a range of formative and summative information to teachers and principals. This provides an informed basis for developing teaching programs targeting the needs of individual students.

Key Features

  • Graphic of three exemplars, each increasing in score

    Exemplars & Descriptors

    Teachers match their students’ work with calibrated exemplars. The performance descriptors support teachers in understanding key features of development.

  • Simplified graphic of the teachers ruler

    The Teacher’s Ruler

    The Teacher’s Ruler provides a scale that spans the full range of performances. By comparing their students’ work to calibrated exemplars and placing them on the Brightpath scale, teachers automatically arrive at scaled scores which are comparable across teachers, schools, and over time.

  • Simple graphic of a bubble report

    Reports

    Reports are immediately compiled as teachers make their judgements.

    These judgements can be used to:

    • Track student growth over time

    • Compare performances across year levels

    • Provide comparative information of performance with that of other schools

What teachers have to say

Brightpath is the whole package for us. NAPLAN gave us some information, and we had done some moderating. Brightpath gave us the ability to really look deeply at the writing samples. We realised our understanding of student writing needed a lot of work. We needed to improve our judgments. And I think our judgments have come a long way in a very short time.

Kerry Hill Literacy Co-ordinator, Charthouse Primary School

What I really love about Brightpath is that it’s about teachers and students. It’s individualised and it’s immediate. I don’t have to wait for the results and I get information to inform what I am doing with my students tomorrow. It’s assessment for learning, tomorrow.

Katrina Bonetti Consultant, WA Primary Principals’ Association

The real strength of Brightpath is the fact that it validates teacher judgments. It gives an opportunity for us to collect data from teachers.

Linda Chandler Deputy Principal, Shelley Primary School

In collaboration with

  • School Curriculum and Standards Authority logo
    School Curriculum and Standards Authority
  • Western Australian Primary Principals’ Association logo
    Western Australian Primary Principals’ Association
  • Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia logo
    Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia
  • Catholic Education Western Australia logo
    Catholic Education Western Australia

Get started using Brightpath

The process is straightforward. You send us your class lists, a list of your teachers and your school details. We upload these to Brightpath and you and your teachers are sent your login details. Once in, you will have access to our on-line course and to all the support materials you need. We will stay in touch and help you get the most out Brightpath.

Learn how to get started today.

Get started using Brightpath

Contact Sandy Heldsinger at 08 9322 7429 or