Introducing Summational and AI Marking

Our fourth product, Summational, will launch in late August with a preview of a Year 7 assessment. Summational will have assessments from Year 1 onwards, bench-marked against the 2021 Model Music Curriculum, while also enabling teachers to create custom-made assessments for their schools.

The assessments can draw from any content across Elemental, Notational and Theoretical.

Why are Summational assessments a useful tool?

One of the findings from research that has stayed with me for years is this nugget from John Hattie,

'It was when I discovered that feedback was most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher that I started to understand it better. When teachers seek, or at least are open to, feedback from students as to what students know, what they understand, where they make errors, when they have misconceptions – then teaching and learning can be synchronized and powerful. Feedback to teachers helps make learning visible.'

Summational assessments have been built therefore to help teachers assess the effectiveness of the curriculum. Do your pupils know what you think they know? I can verify from my many years in the classroom that I may well have taught something but that is no guarantee at all that the pupils know it three weeks later. Summational will provide high quality feedback to teachers on what pupils know and how this compares to the standards set in the MMC.

Don't these assessments have to be marked though? More work. Ugh.

No.

Summational AI. Marking your work, not stealing it.

Summational's assessments have been created so they can be completed and then scanned into our system to be AI marked. For example, KS3 teachers with 10-20 classes this is a game changing development, enabling:

• quality, sound-based assessments
• marked by AI, hugely reducing workload
• while still receiving feedback from the students via AI analysis of the trends in the assessments

Unusually for a software company we have built these assessments to be completed on paper. Most schools don't have 30 computers lying around and anyway, assessment in controlled conditions is on the way back in now that AI is so sophisticated.

Our use of AI is also informed less by blue sky thinking and more by the reality of the classroom. Summational's use of AI will enable more creativity by freeing up teacher time so that teachers themselves have more room to be creative. And on that point...

Intelligent homework

I have always hated remembering to set and check homework for every class. It is one of those tasks that requires just enough thought to meaningfully distract from whatever else I'm doing/teaching and is frankly just a bit annoying.

Our intelligent homework module is coming mid-September. Watch out on our blog for updates on how it will work and ensure you rarely have to think about setting homework again.

Our launch event is on September 18th in Westminster City School. Sign up to attend here: https://forms.gle/DmPJ2pAze9dmQAfN6