Assessment, monitoring and feedback - 7. Use of local and national data to aid assessment

Trend data can be obtained from awarding bodies. Comparing A grades awarded may lead a department to change boards/specifications. This is not likely to be a regular event but could be important when setting up courses. 

In looking at students’ performance, it is possible to compare national performance with the cohort from your own school. This is useful for judgements about how well students are performing in relation to the national average. However, there is a cautionary note with this, as the statistics do not indicate the nature of other students taking the exam. For example; a large proportion of students taking Economics at A Level come from selective schools and so this is likely to distort the nature of the national cohort which a school is comparing its’ results with. To add “flesh” to these figures it is always useful to refer to Examiner reports for a more qualitative analysis of performance, particularly in relation to issues with certain questions.

This unit will help you to

  • use national data to compare students’ exam results across awarding bodies
  • use national and local databases to compare student cohort performance across local schools
  • use a spreadsheet to investigate different patterns of achievement for a cohort of students

The resources which can be downloaded from the column on the right comprise:

  • The full article, including tasks. The tasks cover finding data to compare student achievement across awarding bodies, using national data sets such as Fischer Family Trust and exploring the use of spread sheets in analysing student performance
  • The tasks in Word for personalising for your own use, eg for internal training sessions, departmental discussions
  • Exemplar data for demonstrating use of spreadsheet to analyse student performance
  • Powerpoint presentation (also provided for printing as hard copy) to support the tasks

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