How can you interpret the scaled scores from Sharing Standards?

This year, we’ve completed six national judging windows for Sharing Standards, one each in years 1–6.

After each window, we’ve given schools their results and we’ve also published a selection of scripts on our website. You can see the year 1 results here, year 4 here, year 2 here and year 6 here.

These results are in the format of a scaled score and percentile — for example the extract below was taken from a piece with a scaled score of 493 and was at the 50th percentile in year 3.

On its own, this is really powerful as it gives you more information and prevents some of the distortions caused by grades. So far as we know, it’s the first time schools have been able to get precise scaled score information for writing tasks.

Whilst what we’ve done here is new for writing, it is usual for maths and reading and schools will doubtless be familiar with the outline of this approach.

However, we’ve added one further innovation which is less common. We have placed the results from the different year groups on the same scale. That’s why our scale is so big: it runs from 200–800, to allow room for all these year groups.

There is one caveat: pupils in year 2 & year 6 completed their work in less controlled conditions than pupils in years 1, 3, 4 & 5. This has given pupils in year 2 and year 6 an advantage over the other year groups, as they’ve been able to edit and revise their work. We did think about not including year 2 and year 6 on this scale as a result. However, we found that whilst the different conditions do appear to have inflated their scores relative to the other year groups, it is still useful to see everyone on the same scale provided you take this into account. In future years we will require the same conditions for pupils in all year groups, thus eliminating this problem.

Here is the graph of all 6 year groups on the same scale.

This age-independent scale allows you to do some powerful things that aren’t possible with other measures. We’ll explore these in more detail in future posts, but for now here’s a brief summary.

You can measure the absolute progress of an individual child. This is why we so often say that comparative judgement is not about ranking pupils. If it were just about ranking pupils, all you would be able to see is their relative position. With our age-independent scale, you can measure the absolute progress of an individual child over time. You can reference their current performance to their previous performance — allowing them to create a ‘personal best’, if you like, which they can then improve on over time regardless of the performance of other pupils. If they move from a score of 420 in year 1 to 500 in year 3, you know their writing has improved.

You can look at the progress groups of pupils make across year groups. We all know intuitively that there will be some pupils in year 4 doing better than those in year 5. But how many? What’s typical? Might there be pupils in year 3 doing better than those in year 5? Year 1?? We know from previous research that in some maths topics there is a seven year span of achievement in one age group. Yet when we teach and assess in year group silos, it’s easy to forget this range. These results give you a clearer idea of what this range is.

You can read more about Assessing Primary Writing and get involved here.