So here we are- KS2 SATS Week...

[ampere]

Feeling more nervous than DS2!

He's 'borderline', particularly in Literacy. He'll be so happy if he gets a 4 (as will I!) so off he went just now with me offering my last minute bon mots ('Read carefully! Most of the answers are in the text! If it doesn't make sense, you've not read it properly' etc).

Dancegirl . . You've summed it up! :)

KitKatGirl - I agree these cheating schools give people the impression they are all like that. Not fair on those children and schools that have played by the rules and worked extremly hard for the results they produce.

My dd's head just told me that she'll be put in the wrong set at high school and dis-advantage her if we don't allow her a reader.....Not sure where his reasoning was

No, I don't think my DS's hard work in hopefully squeezing over the 'pass' line to a 4 in Literacy is 'a pile of shit', actually. I think it'll demonstrate that a) he's worked hard and b) he's been well taught.

See, this thing happens in Y7, called CATS. We, as parents, know nothing of them, what exactly our DCs have to do, what their results are in them, by and large. How do you know they aren't 'a pile of shit' as well? Or does one go through one's DC's school life assuming anything that doesn't suit us which we get to know about is 'a pile of shit'?

I meant to add 'Why do we assume this 'secret' thing called CATS magically can sort the DCs into the right sets, 'correcting' for all the horrific inaccuracies that SATS testing promotes? Because we've been told they do? Bearing in mind we have no idea what our DCs do in them? Why the idea that CATS will put the SATS inequities right?

ampere . . little and often would also work for me, I have to say. And also a very good point about them being published too!

Ampere, there is no magic way of sorting children into the right sets. But CATs are designed to test a child's ability. SATs are designed to test whether or not a school has the ability to impart a body of knowledge. Children shouldn't be set based on the ability of a school they no longer even attend.

Anyway, DD's teacher got her got her to rub out an answer that he thought was wrong and reanswer it. It was the question about the girl being 'cool.' DD had originally thought the answer was about the girl being cold and then under direction changed it to being about the girl looking fashionable. I would have thought that given the time period, the first answer was more likely to be right. Did anybody else's child have problems with this question?

And the CATs aren't entirely secret anyway. You can look up example questions.

ampere, what I meant was, because of cheating, etc, the results are not reliable for all children. They may be reliable for our DC, (well, we think they are, because of what they tell us), but not all, and this brings into question overall reliability.
They are not administered in the way that the formal secondary examinations are - there is a huge potential for adults to even inadvertently offer too much support and as schools are desperate to do well in the league tables....

CATS are verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests - basically an IQ test and give some pointers to the type of grades the child is likely to get. Any parents can ask for the information, and infact some schools have special meetings to share the information with parents. As the schools are not judged on the CATS scores, there is no inclination to support the children inappropriately.

My dd did these at primary school after sats on behalf of the secondary. They never did any further testing once they got to high school, just based any movement in sets on teacher observations. Not sure if they will do the same this year with ds.

My dd did these at primary school after sats on behalf of the secondary. They never did any further testing once they got to high school, just based any movement in sets on teacher observations. Not sure if they will do the same this year with ds.

The point I'm making is 'Why are we so outraged about SATS yet we calmly accept that CATS do exactly what it says on the tin- could it be because we are not given ready access to CATS?'. We dismissively say 'SATS are shit/ SATS only measure the school, not the DC in any way, shape or form/ there's no point in doing SATS as the secondaries take absolutely no notice of them at all'... yet we happily go along with the idea that CATS, the tests that take our totally unknown DC and, in some cases, set them for 1/5 of their secondary career, are spot on, measure exactly what they need to measure and are infallible.

I invigilated the reading test today for those DC with extra time at my school. I don't want to say too much about the paper as children who are off ill today can sit it later in the week. But I thought it was a bit easier than last year's, though it had some quite difficult language. Hopefully it will have stretched the level 5 DC.

It is a reading and comprehension test. You are not allowed to read the questions to the DC, as you can in the Maths papers, and you definitely shouldn't be rewording them to help them to understand them, let alone asking them to change their answers. That is out and out cheating.

Elle - I think us MNs may have said too much anyway !

It's new rules this year, I think, that the DC can sit it later in the week. I can't see how they could stop DC talking about the paper, but as I have seen both the reading booklet and the all the questions today, it's perhaps best that I don't say anything about it myself.

DC in state schools do sit-down shut-up exams from y3, too.
The difference with KS2 SATs is whether the results are published.

If (?Do) private primary schools administer the exact same NC SATs & publish them for newspapers to compare? Why not? Given GCSEs+A-levels are usually published for private schools? Are GCSEs-A-level results in private schools ever not published, for that matter?

To be fair Whoopy..only 1 question we need the answer for...the italic one!!!! Come on Ellen put us out of our misery

Ampere, I don't accept that any test should set a child for an entire year. Children should be moved up and down based on their performance in the classroom.

But if they are to be set, it should be based on a test that tests the potential of the child to learn, not of the previous school to teach.

There may be better tests than the CATs for predicting ability, and if so, the CATs should be replaced with better tests of the child. But the SATs should be irrelevant, because they were never designed to be a formative test of a child's ability. They are a summative test of a school's teaching, and a lot of that teaching is actually entirely irrelevant to the secondary school curriculum.

Ask one of the teachers!

CAT results are not published, though, by school, are they?

It's not the testing, it's how the test info gets used that I object to.
Also SAT marking is very strict, I have gone thru it with DC, it's funny what kind of mistakes can lead to zero marks even though the child shows genuine understanding of the actual techniques that need to be used. Is CAT marking also so pernicketty?

If you ask the school about your DC's CATs results they are obliged to give them to you...

CATs are multiple choice. They test what I suppose could be loosely defined as critical thinking. They test things like understanding of analogy, precision in understanding vocabulary and so on.

CATs are multiple choice, marked by a machine, so no interpretation at all.

ampere I am not against testing per se, I just don't think the results are used usefully. And I strongly object to schools encouraging ill children to come in anyway to sit them making them more important than they actually are.

There will always be children who leave school with nothing....and no amount of testing will change that.

They can't sit them later in the week.

And they should be administered in the same way as secondary external exams.

They not simply a measure of how good the school is at imparting information, any more than GCSEs are a measure of the same. They are a measure of a child's performance against a certain set of criteria at a certain time. As all tests are.

In my secondary, we use KS2 data, our own assessment using KS2 SATs questions (I teach Science), plus CAT scores, plus our own regular assessment (skills and content) to plan work for our students. Setting might be based on one measure initially, but the work we do is flexible according to the students' progress after that initial setting. We'd be very foolish not to do that.

That should be a question - they can't sit them later in the week?!!

TheFallenMadonna, they can take them later in the week. It's a new rule for this year. I'll go find the link that feenie gave.