NEW Year 7 writing baseline project for September 2020

Year 7 students will arrive at secondary in September with little information about their prior attainment. A number of schools have asked us if comparative judgement can help to fill this gap, and as a result we are running a new Year 7 writing baseline project.

Here’s how it will work.

• Submit writing: we’ll provide you with a writing stimulus task for your students. Scan and upload their writing to our website by the end of September.
• Judge writing anonymously: use comparative judgement to judge the work of your students and those nationally. 80% of the decisions you make will be of your students. 20% will be of students nationally. Comparative judgement is a very reliable way of assessing open-ended tasks like writing — much more reliable than traditional marking.
• Receive insights: get a report with writing ages for all of your students, analysis of your students’ performance relative to national standards, and exemplars of student writing from across the attainment range. Take part in a webinar with analysis of common writing strengths and weaknesses.

We used comparative judgement to assess 33,000 students from this cohort in March 2020, when they were in Year 6, just a week before lockdown. We will place the results of this September 2020 assessment on the same scale. This means that not only will you get an understanding of your students’ current attainment, but you will also get an understanding of the typical learning loss that has taken place over lockdown.

This project is different from other baseline assessments in two ways.

• First, it consists of an open-ended task, not the closed questions that are typical of baselines.
• Second, it provides you with a robust comparison to the most recent nationally-standardised assessment taken by this cohort before lockdown.

We normally charge for our national assessments but we are offering this for free as it is a one-off project to help schools learn more about their Year 7s given the absence of Sats in summer 2020.

Going forward, we are planning to launch a more comprehensive writing assessment and improvement project in September 2021, which will be informed by the insights and feedback from this baseline project.

If you would like to take part in this free baseline project, the first step is for someone from your school to sign up for one of the information webinars. Our first webinar is on the 30th June and the registration link is here. Our second webinar is on the 6th July and the registration link is here. These webinars will provide you with all the details of the project. You can’t take part in this project unless someone from your school takes part in a webinar!

If you would like to find out more about Comparative Judgement please visit our website www.nomoremarking.com