Running a Student Assessment

This article gives guidance on running a ‘student assessment’, which is the term we give to the sessions in which students go through their online coaching process and create their personal development plan in Aspire.

This article will walk you through how to run an initial student assessment, including:

• A list of things which can be done ahead of the assessment to help ensure it runs as smoothly as possible
• A step-by-step breakdown of what students need to do
• A look at what the student experience will be
• How the system marks student profiles as "completed", and how to make sure your students are all done when your session ends

A printable document which can be given to the staff members running the assessment sessions is attached at the end of this article.

There are also 3 Key Stage-specific lesson plans attached at the end of the article, which we recommend that you use when running the assessments.

Planning Your Assessment

Before we can start inputting data, you will need:

• Accounts created for all of your students - this article explains how to do this if you haven't already
• A computer for each student, for around 60 minutes
• Tutor permissions for the groups being assessed for whoever is overseeing the room while the students are completing the quizzes. You can read more about permissions here

We also recommend that you:

• Ensure all returning students have access to their school emails during the session in case they need to reset their passwords
• Ask your IT team to whitelist our site, and test it yourself to ensure that it works on your end
• Ask your IT team to put a shortcut to the site on Google Chrome on students' desktops
• Pass on our Aspirations lesson plans and the attached printable document to the staff members running the assessments

During the Assessment

What students will need to do

1. Log into computers

2. Open Google Chrome (Aspire works best with Chrome)

3. Go to myaspire.io

4. Click “Register”

Students should then see this screen

 

5. Enter their email and set a secure, memorable password

NB! A lot of students have found it useful to use the same password as their school login

6. Students will need to read an agree to the data usage policy

7. Students should then see this screen

8. In their own time, students should then complete all 7 quizzes by clicking “Start the quiz” and responding to the questions

9. Once enough quizzes have been completed, students will be able to complete their plans

10. Students will be asked to complete 4 steps (shown below):

• Select up to 5 areas to focus on from the topics they indicated an interest in in their quizzes
• Prioritise those focus areas
• Set specific objectives for the term, for each focus area
• Select activities and resources that they plan to use to help them achieve those objectives

Helping Students With Their Quizzes and Plans

It’s likely that, during the session, your students will need some support from you. To give you an idea of what to expect, some examples are:

• We have intentionally included some terminology students may not be familiar with, but which it is helpful to understand. ‘Character traits’ is one which we see being googled a lot mid-session! Please do encourage this
• Setting realistic yet ambitious objectives is hard, at any age! But it’s a very valuable skill to have, so one worth encouraging students to get right. Some teachers have found it useful to put up scaffolded prompts on the board, or to have a quick class discussion on what an objective is
• When students are selecting activities, if there isn’t anything they’d like to try, or if there’s something specific they want, they can do this in the box shown below. This will go to your Aspirations Lead, who will take all of these requests into account when planning future activities

Some useful links to bear in mind:

• Resetting a student password
• The Trends Tab, which can be used to view your progress - although it should be noted that this refreshes overnight, and cannot easily be used to check live progress

We hope you've found this guide useful. If you have any issues with using Aspire, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.