From today (Monday 2nd September), schools can benefit from a new
online assessment product for Key Stage 2 reading and maths,
which is designed to help teachers save time and engage pupils
effectively.
NFER Online Assessments
(NOA) provide interactive, standardised tests that are fun and
appealing for pupils to use. This platform also delivers reliable
information to teachers for diagnostic and summative assessment
purposes.
Pupils will engage with age-appropriate questions and NFER's
friendly interactive guide, NOA the Panda, will be there to guide
them during introductory videos.
Seventy per cent of all NOA questions are marked automatically,
saving teachers valuable time. The remaining 30 per cent are
marked by teachers to ensure there is teacher-level insight into
‘open-ended' and ‘show your working' questions.
NOA also has an easy-to-use, in-built reporting tool which
teachers and school leaders can use to monitor pupil and
class-level attainment across specific curriculum areas such as
addition and subtraction for maths or making inferences from
texts for reading.
Covering reading and maths curricula across autumn, spring, and
summer terms, NOA has been standardised using over 30,000
completed assessments to provide an accurate sample size for data
and reporting purposes.
One primary school involved in the trial of NOA earlier this year
commented: “It was a very efficient system and easy to use.
Children were able to work independently. The data produced was
useful and effective. We were very impressed.”
Claire Hodgson, eAssessment Programme Director at the National
Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), said:
“We're very excited to see NOA being used in schools from this
autumn. Our high quality, interactive suite of standardised
reading and maths tests can be used termly to monitor learners'
progress. We are confident that through our assessment expertise
and robust trialling, we have created a user-friendly system with
engaging questions that are appropriate for curriculum-wide
coverage.
“We are proud that NOA maximises the advantages of online
assessment at the same time as minimising administrative and
marking burden for teachers. The auto-scored questions provide
instant data, while the small proportion of teacher-marked
questions offer valuable insight about each learner. The reports
provide detailed and useful analyses of learners' performance,
supporting identification of strengths and areas for
development.”
NFER's Years 5 and 6 NOA offering will launch in autumn 2025
following the collection of trials data for the autumn, spring,
and summer assessments which will take place during the 2024-2025
academic year.
ENDS℗ NOTES TO EDITORS
NFER Online Assessments (NOA)
NOA adds to NFER's wider assessment portfolio which includes
NFER's widely used paper-based tests. These tests are trusted by
thousands of schools and are available in the core subjects for
termly use across years 1-6. Backed up by more than 75 years of
assessment research, NFER Tests and NFER Online Assessments have
been developed by in-house assessment experts, in collaboration
with teachers.
NOA will be available to purchase in two ways:
- Individual Tokens – one token is equivalent to one assessment
per pupil, per subject, year group and term e.g. a year 3 autumn
term reading token.
- Subscriptions – a one-year subscription per subject that can
be purchased at any time, providing unlimited access to all
autumn, spring, and summer assessments.
Schools and Academy Trusts can purchase NOA products online via
NFER's Resources Shop.
