Empowering teachers with a writing assessment tool that complements NAPLAN
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Each student has unique writing abilities and needs, which can make it challenging and time-consuming to assess and provide effective feedback for everyone in the class.
As school leaders, what we want is a writing assessment tool that is accurate, easy to understand and use, not too time-consuming, and rewarding for students.
Having a system that is also able to fully capture a student’s writing ability or growth over time would be highly beneficial.
That’s why the team behind Brightpath Progress has created an effective way for teachers to assess their students’ writings.
A formative writing assessment that complements NAPLAN
When it comes to assessing and improving your students’ writing skills, nothing can replace the value of your teacher judgements. Brightpath gives you powerful online writing assessment tools that support and complement what you already do in the classroom.
Here’s how it works:
Students first complete Brightpath writing assessments on paper or online, within the program.
Next, teachers assess by comparing their students’ work to real student performances shown on a measurement scale — the Brightpath Teacher’s Ruler.
The Brightpath Teacher’s Ruler provides all the advantages of marking rubrics, automated essay scoring, comparative judgements and using an intuitive display. Plus, feedback about your students’ strengths and areas of improvement are immediate. This allows you to differentiate your lessons plans to cater to the class needs.
Brightpath’s innovative way of assessing writing gives you important data that is reliable, collected through your own assessments of your students using typical classroom tasks.
You can also see how much progress students are making within a year and throughout the years, relative to other students and in terms of their progressions.
Why schools choose Brightpath formative writing assessments
Nearly 1,000 schools across Australia use Brightpath to assess their students’ writings. These schools range from large government, Catholic and independent schools in capital cities through to small, remote schools in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia.
We spoke with Jayne Murray, the Principal of Bramfield Park Primary School, and Lucy Fitzhardinge, the school literacy co-ordinator to get their take on Brightpath as a formative assessment and moderation tool. Bramfield Park Primary School is a fairly large Perth metropolitan school, catering to 300 students from Kindergarten to Year 6.
The value of Brightpath as a tool that provides useful and strong data came to the fore when Jayne explained,
“Once COVID happened and NAPLAN was cancelled, we were still able to get data for our students, and not only for some, but all year levels. This was when everybody at the school appreciated the tool and came on board.”
Jayne and Lucy shared how the staff had discussed and agreed a Brightpath assessment schedule which requires teachers to assess narrative and information report writing twice a year for students in years 1–6. They also explained how they had worked with teachers to agree student performance targets for 2021–2023, using their Brightpath data.
A key take-away from Jayne’s observation is that Brightpath allows schools to collect data that is robust and accurate for all year levels, not just the NAPLAN years, thus providing schools with an excellent complement to NAPLAN.
It’s also proven that students in high-usage Brightpath schools progressed substantially more on NAPLAN than students in schools without Brightpath.
If you’re looking for a formative writing assessment resource that provides targeted and accurate feedback, Brightpath has the tools to support all your school’s assessment needs.
To find out more, contact us at 08 9322 7429 or book a demo here.