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Unpacking Think Mentals results

Think Mentals 1/11/19

We’re zooming towards the end of the school year, and assessment is at the forefront of your mind (along with the occasional daydream about the upcoming festive season!).

You’ve got oodles of student information at your fingertips, but you don’t want to just crunch the numbers – you want to use it in a way that delivers quality end-of-year analysis. That’s where Think Mentals is a game changer!

With Think Mentals, results are systematically organised to provide telling insights into student performance that extend beyond simply allocating an overall score.

These results are presented in an easy-to-understand format that enables you to pinpoint specific strengths and weaknesses in a student’s computation ability.

Here’s a guide to understanding your students’ Think Mentals results.

Breaking down the weekly test results

Along with the unique friendly strategies, an important part of the Think Mentals learning cycle is regular assessment. Each unit contains a weekly assessment task that enables you to test students’ proficiency and track their individual development.

If you’re using the Student Workbooks, students should have recorded their results in their Student Assessment Profile at the back of the book after completing each unit. If you’re using the Digital Classroom, results are automatically collated in each individual’s Student Portfolio.

Hosting all weekly results in a single location allows you to see a student’s overall performance throughout the year at a glance.

The results for each weekly test are separated into two distinct sets.

• Set 1 reveals strategy application
  These results allow you to gauge students’ understanding of the strategies learned — or revised — that week. If you want to dig deeper and discover exactly which strategies are introduced and revised in each unit, refer to the Strategy Overview Guide.

• Set 2 covers general fluency in mathematics
  These results give you a reflection of student performance across the three content strands: Number & Algebra, Measurement & Geometry and Statistics & Probability.

If you use Think Mentals Digital Classroom, you get the bonus of a Class Assessment Results profile. This allows you to swiftly ascertain how individual students are performing in comparison to their peers.

Use the Export as CSV function to either share results with other teachers or pass them on to your curriculum leader for collating whole-school outcomes.

A snapshot of day-to-day performance

If you use Think Mentals Student Workbooks, you can flick through and view each student’s daily scores, which are conveniently located at the bottom of the page. Students may have also used My Time to record how long it took to complete each day’s activities. You can use the times as a further indicator of student performance by comparing student accuracy alongside efficiency.

Those using Think Mentals Digital Classroom will find formative results even easier to review, as they’re automatically collated in each student’s Practice portfolio. Practice results are summarised into the following four components:

• Overview
  See the total number of questions answered by your student and how many were answered correctly.

• Strategy practice results
  Data is collected from the strategy practice questions posed to students when they are first taught a new strategy and asked to apply their learnings. The results for each unit are presented in a graph, which allows you to make a quick comparison of a student’s performance against the class average.

• Strategy revision results
  Data is collected from strategy revision questions and the results split across the four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. These results are presented as a simple bar graph for ease of reference and understanding.

• General fluency practice results
  View the total number of questions answered and how many were answered correctly across the content strands: Number & Algebra, Measurement & Geometry and Statistics & Probability.

Take a moment to view a sample student portfolio for Practice results from Think Mentals Digital Classroom.

Psst … If you like the idea of automated marking and data collation (and who doesn’t?), but you aren’t using Think Mentals Digital Classroom yet, why not give it a try? Log in to your Firefly Online account and add a 30-day free trial.

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