One of the main advantages of ongoing (formative) assessment is that you can see trends from the scores of your learners. That enables you to identify which learners are doing well and which ones are not. You can also see how learners are performing in the various topics and even across subjects.
Discuss the following questions. You can share one or two of your findings with your peers in the discussion forum on QA4ODFL2 Discourse site.
For both questions, you probably saw that it was necessary to decide on how you would analyse the scores. You can use graphs or tables to show scores in a way that shows a clear trend. You can also use descriptive statistics like average, standard deviation, range, etc. In both questions, you may have seen patterns pertaining to which topics or subjects learners did well and in which ones they did badly. If you used ungrouped data in your analysis, you may have identified learners who are doing well and those that are underperforming, and the subjects and topics in which they are doing badly. On the basis of the patterns you identified, you probably indicated that you will provide targeted support to individual learners who are not doing well. You also may have decided to revise some topics with all your learners if your analysis showed unsatisfactory performance by the majority of learners. You may also have seen that the more you group your data, the more you lose individual learners' performance. For example, if you classify the scores into categories (0-9; 10-19; 20-29; 30-39; 40 -49) you obviously lose sight of how John performed over the 6-month period. The main principle is to choose a method that enables you to see patterns you are interested in.
Think of your practice and what data you normally collect and analyse to understand learner performance, and how you collect the data.
How effective is the analysis you do in terms of designing support activities that improve the performance of your learners?
Who do you share the results of the analysis with?
