Year 1 Phonics Check: Understanding individual student reports transcript

Rebecca McEwan: 

Now that we've talked a little bit more about what that data can start to tell us and looked at those tools that we can use for it, let's take a tour through the reports on the Phonics Check platform again, to make sure that you're able to get the most out of those reports and know which sections to look in for your analysis. 

Here we have a snapshot of what is included in the Year 1 Phonics Check platform. To find student reports for an individual student, you'll go through the Reporting tab on the left-hand side. Then you can use the search box at the top and type in your student’s name to find them, or you can select them from the list below if you already see their name. 

When you click onto a student's report, the first thing you'll see is the summary report. At the top of the summary report, you get that first snapshot of the category that your student is sitting in terms of those score indicators. For my example student here, I can see she scored 20 out of 40 on the Check. She's just made it into that developing decoder category. She's a Year 1 student, so that is telling me that she may require some additional support to reach that expected level. 

The next thing on that page, you have four graphs. There are the real simple words, the real complex words, the pseudo simple words, and the pseudo complex words across the page. This is where you can start to take note of, is my student reading complex real words, but struggling with simple pseudo words, giving that indication of whole word reading? Or are we seeing a consistent progression across those simple and complex words, the real and pseudo words, being represented as we would expect if our students are using their decoding? 

We'll move on from there. That's your first snapshot from that individual report.  

As you scroll down the page, you will see the section below labelled as Problem words. These are the words that you've marked as ‘Not yet’ as you've been assessing your student. It doesn't include skipped words, it's just those words that you marked as ‘Not yet’. Don't get excited and think this is a word list to teach my student from, because when we’re really looking at these results, we need to teach code knowledge and those decoding skills, and not specific words. These start to give you insights into what kinds of code, what kinds of words your student was not able to read. We're going to go along and have a look at the detailed report to help us pinpoint what we can do for this student to support them to grow in their learning. 

Here we have what you'll find on your Details report. That would be clicking up in the top right-hand corner of your Reporting screen, and that will bring up details. For this student, it's showing us all of the words from the Check. It's showing us whether we've marked them as ‘Got it!’ or ‘Not yet’, and ‘Skipped’ would come up here as well if you had skipped any words. It will also show us those very important teacher comments. That's again where our annotation can really help with understanding what the difficulty was if we've scored a ‘Not yet’. On this page you can sort the words by showing all of the words; you can ask the platform to show just the words that are marked as ‘Not yet’; or you can select the words that have a ‘Got it!’ mark. This is the report that's going to be really useful for our analysis.