From @RisingStarsEdu – Getting to know your pupils with a reliable bank of curriculum questions

One of the best things about starting the new academic year is getting to know your pupils. Every child has their little quirks and idiosyncrasies. There will be aspects of the curriculum they grasp in an instant, and other areas that are going to need some time and dedication to ensure they fully understand and progress. Assessing children from the beginning of the new term is the only way to gauge exactly where they are in terms of what they have retained from last year, and help to steer those initial lessons in the best possible direction.

To help with this need, Rising Stars is offering teachers a free trial of their Assessment Bank; an agile formative assessment tool to help teachers find quality questions to put to children as they learn, or build bespoke test papers for their class.

Plus, to make finding appropriate questions even simpler, you can filter them by year group, subject, NAHT Key Performance Indicators and Rising Stars Progression Framework statements.

With over 5,200 new curriculum questions to choose from in grammar, punctuation, spelling, maths and science, as well as the sample and actual 2016 National Test Questions and ready-made tests to get you started, you have a vast array of choice for analysing your pupils’ strengths and weaknesses.

“The new academic year is always an intense time for schools,” says Cerys Hadwin-Owen, assessment publisher at Rising Stars. “With new children and challenging expectations, starting off right couldn’t be more important. We hope that this free trial will give schools the opportunity to gauge their pupils’ needs right from day one, and equip teachers with a reliable and easy-to-use formative assessment tool that puts thousands of questions at their fingertips.”

Following the removal of national curriculum levels, appropriate and meaningful assessment is essential, so that teachers, inspectors and senior leadership teams are able to fully understand the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

With this in mind, having a simple and versatile assessment tool that helps you to check children’s knowledge and understanding on an ongoing basis can help to take the stress out of monitoring pupil progress. Additionally, having a growing bank of new curriculum questions to use as lesson starters, plenaries and quizzes can save teaching staff hours of valuable time.

Visit www.risingstars.com/bank to start your free, no obligation, 30-day trial of Rising Stars Assessment Bank.