Assessment timetable 2019-2020

• Grades 1 and 2 : Monday, 16 September to Friday, 27 September 2019.
• mid-Grade 1 assessment : Monday, 20 January to Friday, 31 January 2020.
• Grade 6 : Monday, 30 September to Friday, 18 October 2019.

In line with these date slots, every teacher will choose the assessment times in their class. It is recommended to spread the exercises out over several distinct half-days to avoid overloading the pupils.

Research-based assessments

The assessments have been designed by the Depp, the Scientific Council for National Education (Csen) and Dgesco. They have been developed to mark and understand the type of difficulties that pupils may encounter in learning to read and write and the first elements of maths

Csen has drafted a document entitled ÉvalAide that explains the choices adopted for this national assessment system: goals, scientific foundations and educational advantages.

All the strictly anonymous data will be collected by Depp to provide objective indications in clarifying the Ministry's education policy.

The Ministry for National Education and Youth has appointed a service provider to have an efficient IT tool and offer a large number of teachers quality inputting of assessment results. This service provider and the site hosts will not have access to personal data on pupils and teachers.

Assess to respond precisely to the needs of each pupil

Assessing what pupils have learned at school

The national assessments provide teachers with a detailed overview of knowledge acquired and needs of each pupil in the key skills in French and maths.
They are also a way of :

• involving the parents in the schooling of pupils by giving them the assessment findings
• adjusting the educational project of schools, educational establishments and districts.

Assessing to help better

In Grade 1

September : marker assessments. The teachers check that the pupils have the necessary knowledge to starting learning to read and maths in good conditions.

In French, the assessments measure the level of agility of the pupils to handle syllables and sounds. This ability is an excellent barometer of their ability to learn to read. They also cover pupils' ability to understand words, sentences or a short text read by the teacher.

Pupils are checked in maths for their knowledge of numbers up to ten and their ability to use them in a simple situation.

January-February : an assessment gives the teacher clear indications on changes in their pupils' acquired knowledge, mainly reading fluency.

In Grade 2

The Grade 2 assessment takes place in September and covers reading, writing and numeracy.

In French : ability to decipher quickly the words, read fluently out loud, understand a simple text and spell the most frequent words correctly.

In maths : use whole numbers higher than ten, use the first notions of geometry.

In Grade 6

The national assessments for Grade 6 pupils in French and maths are taken online and corrected automatically. The nature and difficulty of the questions that the pupils are asked vary according to the accuracy of the pupil's responses. Pupil monitoring is adjusted during Grade 6 based on the results of these assessments.

The pupil receives one-to-one feedback from the teachers for all these assessments. This can give rise to a collective or individually meeting organised with the parents.

Assessments 2018-2019 : first encouraging results

Depp has published the assessment results for school year 2018-2019.

At the start of Grade 1 class, 23 % of pupils struggle with knowing letters and sounds and using numbers.

At mid-Grade 1, the assessment results show that the pupils have made progress.
They have made progress in acquiring the reading basics with a drop of six points in the number of pupils struggling.
They have become more proficient with numbers : the proportion of struggling pupils has dropped from 23.9 to 13.2 %, i.e. a drop of ten points in the number of pupils struggling.

At start Grade 2, in French, the pupils still have difficulties too frequently in reading and dictation of words.

In maths, the results highlight difficulties in solving problems and online calculations.

Between start Grade 1 and mid-Grade 2, the discrepancies are dropping between priority education pupils and non-priority education pupils due to the splitting of classes and educational mobilisation :

• for the knowledge of letters and sounds, the discrepancy is almost divided by 3 (dropping from 9 to 3.4 points)
• for the recognition of phonemes, it drops from 12.1 to 5.2 points
• for the comparison of numbers, the discrepancy is almost halved (dropping from 12.8 to 7.6 points)
• for digital line placement, it drops from 14 to 9.4 points