FAQ

Fluency is a measure of both accuracy and speed and therefore it taps into the students’ skill mastery. When skills have been mastered, students can flexibly use the skill to solve novel problems (VanDerHeyden & Peltier, 2023). Students who have mastered skills have more available working memory to use during problem solving (as per cognitive load theory; Sweller & Chandler, 1991). In the number facts addition task, students answer up to 39 single-digit addition questions in one minute. Because single-digit addition is in the students’ instructional range, most students in grades 1 to 4 could correctly answer all the questions and so accuracy alone cannot be used to measure mastery or growth in learning. By measuring students’ fact fluency, teachers can identify which students need support to move from skill acquisition to skill mastery.

There is no causal evidence that timed tests lead to math anxiety (Powell et al., 2022). That said, some students may feel anxious completing timed tests. To minimize potential stress, tests should be administered appropriately: they should fall within the student’s instructional range, there should be enough items that most students don’t complete the test, and there should be clear expectations. The EMA test administration ticks all these boxes. And importantly, instructions are explicit, “You may not finish all the items, that’s OK.”

The purpose of a diagnostic assessment is to answer the question: “what skills have the students mastered and what skills need to be reinforced?” (Lembke et al., 2022). According to the policy and resource guide from the Ministry of Education (2017), diagnostic assessments should be used before instruction so teachers can identify appropriate and personalized learning goals for their students.. Diagnostic assessments can include a wide range of measures, including standardized tests, consulting with last year’s teacher, reviewing report cards, or anecdotal notes. They can also include assessments developed by teachers to analyse student errors and help guide instruction (Lembke et al., 2022).

Screeners are brief, reliable, and valid diagnostic assessments that are intended to be administered to all students in a classroom. They are typically used for early identification of students at risk for learning difficulties (Catts & Hogan, 2021; Gaab & Petscher, 2022). Screeners are evaluated in comparison to a norm or benchmark. They can be used to monitor student progress and identify appropriate instructional supports for students deemed at risk (Lembke et al., 2022). Importantly, screener results provide a snapshot of where students are at in their learning and should be interpreted with other information available about the student and the instructional context.

The EMA@School is universal screener that can be used to help identify students that may need extra support in math. If the student has learning difficulties and requires specific accommodations or modifications, such as added time to complete testing, or testing at a lower grade level, the test should be administered individually. Importantly, if modifications are made to the testing, the modified scores cannot be compared to the normed guidelines. The modified test scores can however, be used to help you track the student’s individual progress from one test administration to the next.

For students who are not proficient in the language of instruction, the test instructions can be simplified, or if feasible, given in the student’s first language. Importantly, you want the modification, to still reflect the skill you are assessing (Kettler, 2012). For specific tasks such as counting and naming numbers, use your professional judgement. For example, you may want the student to do these tasks in both languages to better understand if the score is a reflection the student’s number skills or language skills. Of course, you will need to review any associated at-risk levels in the context of the test administration and the student’s specific accommodations.