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SEED Sponsored Research: Children starting school in Scotland

2 Background

In Scotland 393 schools in 10 education authorities assess children using the PIPS On-entry BLA when they first enter Primary 1 and at the end of their first year of schooling. The PIPS On-entry BLA is one of several projects run from the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management (CEM) Centre at the University of Durham (CEM Centre, 2004; Fitz-Gibbon, 1996; Tymms and Coe, 2003), which aim to provide schools with data on the attainment, progress and attitudes of their pupils. Children are typically assessed using the PIPS On-entry BLA within their first six weeks of compulsory education at the start of Primary 1. The assessment, which is computer-delivered, is administered individually and the whole procedure takes approximately 20 minutes per child.

The content is based on those factors which previous research has shown to be the best predictors of later success or difficulty at school (for a review of the relevant literature, see Tymms and Middleton, 1995 and Tymms 1999b). These tend to reflect the general developmental level of a child rather than the outcome of any specific curriculum, particularly at the start of school. The style of presentation of the assessment has been designed to be attractive and appealing to children and teachers have repeatedly reported that children find the experience of completing the PIPS Baseline an enjoyable one.

The following areas are assessed:

• Writing - the child is asked to write his/her own name and the quality of writing is scored against examples.
• Vocabulary - the child is asked to identify objects embedded within a picture.
• Ideas about reading - assesses concepts about print.
• Repeating Words - the child hears a word and is asked to repeat it in this assessment of phonological awareness.
• Rhyming Words - the child selects a word to rhyme with a target word from a choice of three options in this assessment of phonological awareness.
• Letter identification - a fixed order of mixed upper and lower case letters.
• Word recognition and reading. This starts with word recognition and moves on to simple sentences that the child is asked to read aloud. The words within these sentences are common to most reading schemes. This is followed by a more difficult comprehension exercise which requires the child to read a passage and at certain points select one word from a choice of three that best fits that position in the sentence.
• Ideas about mathematics - assessment of understanding of words underlying mathematical concepts.
• Counting and Numerosity - the child is asked to count four objects. These disappear from the screen and then the child is asked how many objects they saw. This is repeated with seven objects.
• Sums - addition and subtraction problems presented without symbols.
• Shape identification.
• Digit identification - single, two-digits and three-digits.
• Maths problems - including sums with symbols.

The computer program presents the child with questions (aurally) and depending on the nature of the question, the child responds either by pointing to the answer from the choice of options on the screen or by saying the answer. The teacher controls the pace of the assessment and records the child's response on-screen. The program selects the next appropriate question. The way that the assessment works is illustrated by referring to the section relating to vocabulary. In this a child is shown a picture and asked to point to an item in the picture. The first picture is of a kitchen and for the first item the child is asked to identify the 'carrots'. The program continues with further, progressively more difficult, vocabulary items until finally it becomes too difficult for the child. At that point the program moves onto the next section. Each section operates independently but in a similar format of a sequence with stopping rules.

Because of the structure of the assessment it is extremely reliable. The test-retest reliability is 0.98. The internal reliabilities for the subscales analysed in this report are as follows:

The reliability of some of the sub-scales is quite low because there are so few items in the scale, however the ones that form the main focus of this report (vocabulary, reading, phonics and mathematics) are very high.

Feedback for schools from the initial assessment is in the form of charts and tables. It includes raw scores and standardised scores based on a representative sample of Scottish schools, stacked bar charts highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual children and box and whisker plots providing a picture of the distribution of standardised scores in each class.

The re-assessment of each child towards the end of the first year of schooling provides pupil-level information for Primary 1 teachers as they reflect on the achievements of their pupils and for Primary 2 teachers as they look to the future. Feedback from this second assessment includes a table of raw and standardised scores with measures of value added and attitudes, line charts showing progress in terms of improvement in each child's raw scores and scatter plots providing an alternative presentation of the attainment and value-added for a whole class.

The PIPS Baseline recognises the importance of and assesses personal, social and emotional development and also inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive behaviour at the end of the first year, although these are not analysed or discussed in this report.

Although intended for schools to enable them to monitor the relative progress of their pupils, the assessment details gathered at pupil-level in Scotland are also valuable for research purposes. Croxford (1999), for example, analysed PIPS data to report on inequality in the first year of schooling and Fraser et al. (2001) used PIPS data to evaluate the National Early Intervention Project. Croxford (2001) used PIPS data to monitor inequality and evaluate the early intervention programme in Aberdeen. Her analysis of the assessment carried out on entry to school showed that lower scores were generally found for younger children, for those coming from a relatively poor home background and for those who had English as a second language. Over a 3-year period she found evidence of a dramatic rise in average reading scores at the end of Primary 1, but no reduction in social inequality. In Aberdeen, data from PIPS assessments are available for Primary 1 and Primary 3 pupils dating back to 1997 and continues to be used to track changes in attainment in reading and mathematics, differences in attainment between boys and girls and the gap in attainment between disadvantaged and advantaged children.

There is now an international dimension to the PIPS project and parallel data from around 4000 schools in England, 500 schools in Western Australia and a further 80 in New Zealand have been gathered. As a result, a large and unique dataset relating to children starting school in several countries has been created. It is this dataset that is exploited for the purposes of this report.

Before exploring the PIPS data, however, it is important to determine the extent to which the education authorities using PIPS in Scotland were representative of Scotland as a whole. We consider this particular question in the next section.

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