How to track progress using writing ages in Assessing Primary Writing

A common question that schools have regarding their Assessing Primary Writing results is, ‘How can we use the results to track pupil progress?’ This article suggests the use of writing ages for pupils to monitor their progress.

Before we look at writing ages, let us look at the results you obtain from the APW assessments. If you go to Check results, you can download the Candidate Results CSV file:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e50db7dc-2f7e-400b-b3cd-f4a282836a20/Untitled.png

In the CSV file you will see a number of columns with different measures:

https://static.helpjuice.com/helpjuice_production/uploads/upload/image/4348/direct/1542789253179-Picture1.png

Firstly, we have the level of the pupil. These levels are assigned not based on criteria. Rather they are based on the position of the pupil in the APW cohort based on their scaled score. By using the most recent national KS1 or KS2 SATS percentages pupils achieving WTS, EXS and GDS, because we know we have a nationally representative sample of schools taking part in APW, we can assign levels to the APW cohort in the same proportions of WTS, EXS and GDS as the SATs results.

We also have the scaled score for the pupil in this assessment – the scale used is our APW writing scale which is the same scale used across different year groups and stretches from a minimum of around 250 to a maximum of around 700.

The percentile is also based on the scaled score, and shows the position of the pupil within the cohort taking part in the APW assessment (0 being the lowest performers and 1 being the highest). A value of 0.5 would indicate that the pupil is at the half-way position within the cohort – i.e. at the 50% position within the cohort. A value of 0.75 puts the pupil at the 75% position, i.e. 25% from the top performers.

Measuring progress

The level and the percentile assigned to the pupil are useful for looking at the relative position of the pupil within the cohort at the time of the assessment. They are however not so useful for measuring the progress of the pupil over time (for example, if a pupil has a percentile value of 0.5 one year and 0.5 in the following year’s assessment, that does not mean that the pupil has not made ‘absolute’ progress – they just haven’t made progress relative to others).

The scaled score is more useful – the change in scaled scores between one assessment and the next is an indicator of progress. The drawback of using the scaled score for measuring progress is that it is not as meaningful as it could be. For example, what does a change in scaled score of 20 actually mean?

Our suggestion is that using the writing age results for a pupil is the most meaningful for looking at progress – see our blog here on how we derive these writing ages. We can use writing ages for progress in two different ways.

Firstly, we can use writing age as a measure of a pupil’s expected progress up to that point in time. For example, if a pupil’s actual age is 9 years and 2 months when they sit the assessment, and their writing age from the assessment is 10 years and 4 months, then we can calculate that their progress in writing up until that assessment is +14 months – i.e. 14 months above where we would expect the pupil to be.

The second way to use writing age is progress between assessments. If we know the change in writing age between one assessment and another, and we know the number of actual months between the two assessments, we can work out whether the pupil is making expected progress. For example, if a pupil achieves 9 years and 5 months in a national APW assessment in October, and then achieves 9 years and 11 months in an optional assessment in March, that means they have made 6 months progress in writing age in a period of 5 months – they have made additional progress of +1 months.

In this way, we hope that the writing ages provide a more meaningful measure of pupil progress in writing.