30,000 Teachers signed up for a happy new era!

14 January 2010

While students are getting ready to receive their GCSE and A-level results today, we sometimes forget that teachers are also working overtime behind the scenes. Have you ever thought about the work that teachers do, supporting students and analysing results?

At AQA we know how much work teachers put in at results time and we want to support them every step of the way. In 2007 we conducted a pilot of our Enhanced Results Analysis (ERA) with 57 schools and colleges, now we have over 30,000 teachers registered to use it.

ERA is a free online tool that provides teachers with an instant breakdown of exam results at the click of a mouse. They are able to access the results from home, which could be particularly useful if the weather conditions continue to make it difficult for schools to open. With clear and simple snapshots, it provides information on how their school, subject, class and individual students performed.

Several new developments in ERA technology are now available. Teachers are able to analyse students' exam results in groups and identify trends by comparing with national averages, with the rest of the school and even with other groups. By creating groups teachers can evaluate by class, ability level or whatever category they choose. Research has shown that teachers are creating groups based on gender, summer born/winter born students, different literature texts studied, amongst others and comparing exam performance across these groups.

Simon Cuthbertson - head of Geography at The King's School, Worcester said:

"I found it extremely helpful to have the gender analysis done for me as this is one area I have always monitored. As for the summer-born children analysis, this is something I initially did out of pure curiosity partly to see what ERA tool could do. Another way I would like to use ERA is to analyse the type of question by gender."

Teachers can also identify students' specific strengths and weaknesses by reviewing how students have performed against specification objectives, specification references or skills and topics covered by the exam. AQA are currently piloting this analysis for selected subjects and components.

Anne Quine from Ballakermeen High school in the Isle Of Man said:

"I've found the information available really useful for GCSE English and English Lit. To have access to each students' raw marks allows us to identify any areas we might need to improve in our teaching and preparation, either in terms of particular skills or in terms of allowing students to access the top grades."

From this summer, most AQA papers have data available at the question level. This means that teachers can really explore in detail what has worked for their students and what hasn't, allowing them to focus their teaching.

Anne Quine also said:

"Having the mark schemes available with the results is another good idea again allowing us to spot the gaps. Perhaps even more useful is the information available for AS English and English Lit broken down by question or Assessment Objective. Should be really useful for preparing student for re-sit and for next years teaching as we come to grips with a new specification."

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