COMPARE: Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) tool. 

Humans are better at judgements when comparing two things against each other rather than absolutely.

(Thurstone, 1927)

Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) is a low stakes approach to assessment, where several judges COMPARE writing/work/competencies and then, using our computer algorithm, arrive at the Collaborative Professional Consensus (CPC) or rank order.  

As several judges define the CPC order, ACJ is a highly reliable and valid way to assess subject competencies (like writing) in primary and secondary schools.

There are several benefits to be gained from using ACJ to assess those competencies over usings rubrics, frameworks or criterion assessments:

  • Reliability: ACJ often has a much higher reliability score over traditional marking using rubrics or criteria that can be much less reliable.
     
  • Collabrative Professional Consensus (CPC): Judging in our benchmarked sessions means that your children's writing will be largely judged by teachers (approximately 20) from outside your school.  A wide range of teacher's professional judgements elicit your CPC.
     
  • Time: It normally takes less than an hour to assess a year group's writing, approximately 60-90 seconds per judgement. The more judges, the less time needed and the better the whole school CPD.
     
  • ASSESSMENT: COMPARE is low stakes and not seen as a test or assessment by the children taking part. Removing the criteria for a writing task often liberates the writer.
     
  • CPD: Get all of your teacher across your school to judge in a staff meeting (1hr 20 mins max) for every year group so that teachers across the whole school understand what writing looks like within the writing range.  Use COMPARE in the staff meetings to stimulate discussions between all staff to support writing improvement. Set writing targets and talk about pedagogy from what professionals seen in the ACJ session (30 mins). We've blogged about what we do in our school here
     
  • Marker Fatigue: Marking a class worth of books against rubrics and criteria can take a couple of hours.  By the time your marking the last set of books you're quite mentally fatigued, those judgements suffer from and are affected by that fatigue.  As you are only making a comparative judgement against two pieces of writing your judgements aren't affected by your fatigue.
     
  • COMPARE accepts PDF, MP4 voice recording, Video recording, HTML pages and Website links (You Tube etc) all of which can be compared in an ACJ session.

Interested?  Hit 'SUBSCRIBE', complete the information needed and we'll get back to you with some simple instructions to get you started.

        AssessProgress: COMPARE for secondary schools is unlimited where schools adminstrate their own sessions.  We are interested in working with secondary schools, particularly those who wish to benchmark in groups, in order to streamline your use of ACJ for assessment.