Assessing Primary Writing 2023–24: Year 2 results
Over the last few weeks, 1,048 primary schools have taken part in our Year 2 writing moderation task. In total, 12,019 teachers from these schools judged the writing of 44,342 year 2 pupils. The overall reliability of the judging was 0.89, which shows a high level of consistency between teachers.
The task
The task is in the figure below. Pupils completed the task in controlled conditions to ensure the writing was independent.
Why do we set a specific task?
Schools want us to set a specific task as it is harder to judge when everyone is doing something different! Because the work has been completed in independent conditions, it is not directly comparable with work completed in more structured conditions. You may find that work that doesn’t ‘look’ that impressive is getting a high score, but please remember that pupils have responded in independent conditions to the stimulus so some errors are to be expected!
The results
As the judging was completed to a high degree of reliability, we can see the scaled scores of all 44,342 pupils on the same measurement scale, shown below. The measurement scale runs from approximately 300–700 and is consistent across all of our assessments at primary and KS3.
With the measurement scale in place, we can estimate for every pupil their writing age and an indication of whether they are at the Expected Standard or Greater Depth Standard for their year group.
WTS / EXS / GDS indicator
We have written before (extensively!) about the limitations of the WTS / EXS / GDS scale, and we think that the scaled score and writing age both provide you with more nuanced information about pupil performance. However, we also know that schools are keen to have at least some idea of where these national thresholds might sit, so we have provided a statistical indicator as to where these grades are. We do this in the following way.
First, we check to see how representative our sample of schools is. We do this by looking at the overall profile of all our participating schools who also have national Year 6 Sats results in 2023. We found from this comparison that our sample of schools are representative. The schools averaged 104 in their KS2 reading results compared with 104 nationally. 79% of pupils in these schools achieved EXS+ in reading, compared with 79% nationally, and 20% achieved a reading high score, compared with 20% nationally. We therefore have a large and nationally representative sample of schools, not skewed towards high or low attainment in any way.
Now we know we have a nationally representative sample, we can apply grades to it using national statistics, in the following way. We know that in 2022, in year 2, 8% of pupils achieved greater depth nationally in writing, and 60% EXS+. Given that we have a nationally representative group of schools, we can draw lines on our distribution at the 8% and 60% mark, as you can see below.
We can then identify the scaled score point that these thresholds correspond to and use these as the grade boundaries. For this year, they are as follows EXS = 454; GDS = 548.
Perhaps the most important thing to realise about these grades is that they do not represent end-of-year expectations. If a pupil gets a GDS on this assessment, it means that their piece of work has come in the top 8% of a large, nationally representative sample of February Year 2 writing. We would expect the same pupils to produce higher quality work in June / July, and for the boundaries to increase accordingly.
To read more about how these boundaries change over time, see here.
Writing age
We know from our previous work that there is a relationship between age and writing score. For example, we are able to say that the average scaled score achieved by pupils aged 7 years and 2 months is 473. We can therefore say that a scaled score of 473 is equivalent to a ‘writing age’ of 7 years and 2 months. We can then extrapolate from this relationship to provide a writing age equivalent for every scaled score on our scale. So, pupils achieving a scaled score of 455 have a writing age of 6 years and 9 months; pupils with a scaled score of 525 have a writing age of 9 years and 0 months.
We have not updated our writing age standardisation this year. It is based on the writing of students from year 1 to year 9 and is capped at 5y6m at the bottom, and 14y1m at the top.
We would also point out that there is always more uncertainty about scores at the very top and very bottom of our scale — as indeed is the case with most assessments. If you are concerned about a very high or very low score, we’d suggest looking at the confidence intervals associated with that score. You can find these on the final page of the PDF report and in the Excel spreadsheet.
Examplars
A few extracts from the pupil writing can be found here. Subscribers are given access to a complete booklet of exemplars.
More to follow
This blog has summarised the Year 2 Assessing Primary Writing results, and the Year 6 results will be out next week. We have two more no more writing assessments this academic year: Year 4 and Year 5 non fiction tasks in May.
