Year 1 Phonics Check: Understanding group reports transcript

Kerrie Shanahan:

Now we're going to have a look at the group reports. We're going to take a quick tour of a group report and we'll talk about how to generate the report and how to read it. 

First, let’s look at how to generate a group report.  

You can do this by finding the Reporting tab that's in the blue sidebar there. Then make sure your name and class comes up that you want to select. Then check the box, ‘View the distribution of answers by words’. This will generate the report for you, which you can then view on screen.  

If you would like to print the report, the easiest way to do this is to export the report to Excel and print from there. To do this, you'll see an Export to Excel button on the bottom of that page. 

This is what a group report looks like.  

In this view, you'll see all the students’ scores down the side there. You can look down each column to see how many students have read a particular word correctly. For example, the word there, ‘frex’, you can see how many students got it correct and how many didn't by simply counting the correct responses, the green ticks in that column. You can also look across a row to see a particular student's results. You can scroll across to see the student’s ‘Got it!’ and ‘Not yet’ results. Any words that you skip for students will show up as a blank box. That, of course, indicates that the student was having a high level of difficulty. 

Group reports can be helpful for picking up patterns across your class or across a whole cohort of students.  

Here you can see a couple of example words. We've got the word ‘beff’, and in that column we can see lots of green ticks. That means that all of the students were able to read this word correctly. In the second column, the example word there, ‘doil’, it shows that many students are not yet able to decode this word. You can start to consider why this might be. For example, it could be that the ‘oi’ digraph is challenging, and you might need to re-teach it. Or possibly it hasn't been taught yet, so that might be the reason why so many students can't decode that word correctly. Also, your students' notes from when you were scoring will give you more information on why particular students may have had difficulties. You can check your student notes to delve further. 

Group reports are useful for finding group-level strengths, so the knowledge and skills that your class has mastered, and also the group-level areas of instructional needs, so the knowledge and skills that your class still needs more work on.