Your Child Is Struggling in School. But Do You Actually Know Why?
Updated: 6 days ago
"A mark identifies a result, not necessarily the underlying problem." Two SEA children could both score 55% and require completely different interventions.
When a child is struggling in school, the first step should be to identify the specific skill causing the difficulty. A test score can show that there is a problem, but a diagnostic assessment can help distinguish between gaps in knowledge, comprehension, application, fluency, decoding, written expression or other underlying skills.
A Mark Tells Us What Happened. It Doesn't Always Tell Us Why.
Students and parents alike are usually most interested in the marks given after a test. "Miss, how much ah get?" The mark, though useful, is only a vague insight into the child's performance level at that point. It does not give a clear idea of exactly what is going wrong, where, and what needs to be done to correct it.
Assessment questions are made to test a student's knowledge of a particular topic on the syllabus, in a particular way. That means a well-constructed assessment should challenge the child's knowledge of the topic and, depending on the topic, their ability to express that knowledge in different ways.
Two Children, Same Mark, Different Problems
If every item on the assessment follows this rule, then two children could receive the same mark in total and need two completely different forms of intervention. One child may struggle with fluency and decoding while the other has issues with expression. The way to know the difference is a full and clear diagnostic. It is a way to identify the exact gaps in a child's knowledge.
What Does a Diagnostic Actually Show?
The test is built based on the knowledge points a child should have at that stage. A diagnostic then uses the test as built, and, more important than the marks, maps the questions and items of the assessment to knowledge points on the syllabus. Depending on the rigor of the diagnostic, this can be extended to the skills within each part of a question. The result is most telling.
Imagine a child gets a two-part Mathematics question about fencing a piece of land wrong. This child is actually being assessed on his ability to understand units of measurement, recognise and use the properties of the shape, determine missing measurements, calculate the perimeter, select and apply the appropriate formula or procedure, and calculate accurately. A single wrong answer does not tell us at which of those points the difficulty occurred. The child's “working”, more than the mark allocated, helps reveal where the child struggled.
In English, a child may attempt a comprehension question requiring them to read the passage and the question, identify what the question is asking for, possibly make an inference, then express themselves clearly in a well-structured and punctuated sentence in Standard English. A wrong answer could reveal a gap in any one, or multiple, of those stages.
Take a comprehension question asking a child to explain why a character in a passage stopped speaking to her best friend. A wrong or incomplete answer could come from several different places. The child may have skimmed past the paragraph where the falling out happens and missed the detail entirely. She may have read it correctly but misunderstood what the question was actually asking, answering with a general summary instead of the specific reason required. She may have understood the passage and the question but been unable to draw the inference the writer intended, since nothing is stated outright. Or she may have worked out the right reason in her head but failed to put it into a properly structured sentence, losing marks on expression rather than comprehension. Four different children could get that question wrong for four completely different reasons, and only a diagnostic that breaks the question down stage by stage shows which one.
This is why we do diagnostics.
We use assessments deliberately built to test the knowledge expected at a given stage. We analyze each question, map it to syllabus points and required skills, and check the student's response against each of those points. What's left is a clear map of the child's knowledge, skill application, and needs. This is what we teach by.
Not sure what's behind your child's difficulty?
Think-Top Educational Institute uses diagnostic assessment to identify specific academic gaps before deciding what support a student needs.
Krys-Darcelle Dumas is the Founder and Lead Educator of Think-Top Educational Institute in St. Augustine, Trinidad. She holds a BA in English Literature with Linguistics from the University of the West Indies, has lectured part-time at UWI for seven years, and teaches English and Literature at the secondary level with the Ministry of Education. She specializes in structured literacy and Orton-Gillingham based reading intervention for children in Trinidad and the Caribbean.
