Endorsement: How MERiT can help you understand your mock results?

Jo Gough is HoD for Science at Treviglas Academy, a secondary school in Newquay, Cornwall. Here, Jo tells us about the benefits of using MERiT, Exampro’s mock reporting tool.

MERiT allows teachers to identify gaps in their students’ understanding and informs their plans for teaching and interventions.

Comparing student performance

Having used MERiT for the past year, my team have found it really useful.

MERiT allows us to compare our student performance against national data, so that we’re better able to produce meaningful predicted grades for our students. Our department is rapidly improving so it’s vital for us to be able to take external, national data and use this as a benchmark for our internal tests. This is particularly useful for discussions with SLT – we’re able to evidence how our students are doing by showing their performance against a national picture. This makes it really clear where improvements are being made, and helps to inform realistic, relevant and focused targets.

Targeting groups

MERiT is so easy to use: we use SIMS to input our student data and then we upload their mock results when they’re done. Once the national data is available, we can compare and review how we’ve done as classes, a cohort or as a school. We can download the information so it’s easily filtered to target specific groups, for example, we can look at how well our girls are performing compared to our boys, or look specifically at how pupil premium students are doing. It helps us build a picture of the areas where we’re doing well, but also of where we need to target our interventions to ensure that all our students are given the opportunity to reach their potential.

Targeting areas for development

It’s not just about targeting groups of students though, MERiT can also help us to target specific topics. The reports it generates give us a clear breakdown of Assessment Objectives and specification strands. We can spot areas where our students haven’t performed as well and use this to inform our departmental CPD – we like to find subject-specialists and use our links with external companies to find advice on areas where we want to see improvements. If students are struggling with questions involving maths, for example, we can identify this and ask our maths department for support and tips. And it’s not just the current year group that benefits from this. We can apply what we’ve learnt from one class or year group and apply this to other year groups so we’re continually adapting and improving our teaching.

Motivation

MERiT has been really motivational for our students and also for our team. Being able to compare against national data really boosts our students’ determination to do well.  We share their MERiT reports with them so they can clearly see their strengths and weaknesses. The focus is always on improving grades – for students and teachers – so being able to show that all our hard work and interventions are paying off is really valuable.

Our team has only used MERiT for a year, but it’s definitely a tool we’ll continue to use in the future.

Try it for yourself and sign up to MERiT.