7 steps to Create a Diagnostic Math Assessment for Students

Education has evolved to become an important sector in the development space. In countries such as India, imparting free and quality education is a huge challenge. ASER reports have always highlighted the dark reality of education in India. The poor status of learning outcomes of children has led to the entry of a vast number of social organizations and huge disbursement of CSR funding into education. With the growing maturity of these organisations, people have started to realize that intervention alone cannot be termed as impact and hence the need to conduct separate and independent evaluation techniques have become indispensable in the development domain. Employing diagnostic tool to identify learning levels of students at the base and end of the intervention is a popular tool used by education-related organisations to evaluate their impact. The article aims to provide an introduction to diagnostic assessment and steps to create a math diagnostic assessment to identify the learning levels of students.

Steps to create Diagnostic Math Assessment

Step 1: Resource Check

To create an assessment, the following resources are required to be in place:

• The curriculum of the subject, eg. MSCERT, NCERT Syllabus

• List of learning outcomes derived from the curriculum

• Reference Textbook, eg. Balbharati

• Other resources of assessment, eg. Saksham, PSM etc.

Step 2: Creating a blueprint of available assessment

Blueprint is the structure of any assessment. Blueprint includes topic from the curriculum, learning outcome that the question aims to evaluate, sample question and score/marks for the question.

• Map out the available validated assessment, if any. Breakdown it into the area, topic, type of question and score.