As some of our readers will already be aware, Brightpath provides exceptional formative assessments for schools. The researchers behind Brightpath have over 25 years of theoretical exploration and hands-on expertise in educational measurement and they have leveraged off this knowledge to develop assessment solutions that have been proven to advance student learning.

The Brightpath writing assessments use an innovative assessment process. When assessing their students’ writing within Brightpath, teachers compare their students’ work to calibrated exemplars. Whilst there is something deeply intuitive about this approach, the methodology represents a significant breakthrough in educational assessment.

Figure 1: Narrative Teacher’s Ruler

Preview of Figure 1: Narrative Teacher's Ruler

Brightpath provides inbuilt moderation as all teachers are comparing their students to the same scaled set of exemplars. In addition, the empirical research undertaken to calibrate the Brightpath writing scales, provides detailed information about how writing develops. So, when teachers place their students on a Brightpath scale, they instantaneously know in detail their students’ strengths and weaknesses and what they need to teach their students next.

Figure 2: Extract of the teaching points for the narrative ruler

Preview of Figure 2: Teaching Points Narrative Teacher's Ruler

This information is great for students too, as teachers can readily provide specific and targeted feedback to students and they can easily include students in the assessment process.

From school leaders’ perspective, because all teachers are placing their students on the same scale and because the assessment has an inbuilt moderation process, it is straightforward for school leaders to collect whole school data that is as robust as NAPLAN data.

For all three: teachers, students and school leaders, Brightpath makes it easy to track and evaluate student growth in learning.

So … where does the assisted marking come in? Well … careful assessment takes time. Moreover, as writing develops and becomes more multifaceted, marking becomes slower and more difficult. The Brightpath marking assistant helps upper primary and lower secondary teachers out. Their students can complete their writing online, and when they do, the program analyses their writing and provides predicted scores. Teachers are left to focus their attention on assessing those aspects of writing that humans need to judge, the authorial aspects of writing, and they can draw on their professional judgement to refine their students’ scores.

This short video demonstrates how Brightpath’s Assisted Marking works.

Want to know more?

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