Diagnostic guidance
Many of our NFER Tests materials for years 1-6 include diagnostic commentaries, providing formative assessment guidance to help you inform teaching and learning. We have developed these commentaries, so that in addition to enabling a reliable way to monitor attainment and progress, our assessments provide you with formative benefits and valuable next-steps guidance. With the use of this guidance, you’ll be able to:
- compare pupils’ performance with the performance of the thousands of pupils in who trialled our materials during our standardisation process
- identify which errors and misconceptions made by pupils were commonly made by the standardisation group
- gain valuable suggestions on how to address these common misconceptions in future teaching.
Diagnostic commentaries have been developed by our assessment experts and are provided for questions where pupils in the large-scale standardisation trial systematically made similar errors and demonstrated widespread misconceptions. The percentage of pupils who answered the question correctly is shown alongside information about common errors and implications for teaching. Examples of the type of guidance you'll find in our materials are available below.
Where you’ll find our diagnostic guidance
Diagnostic guidance is included with many of our assessment materials, including:
- spring term teacher guides for all subjects
- grammar and punctuation, and spelling teacher guides
- year 6 autumn and spring teacher guide packs across all subjects (a separate diagnostic guidance booklet is provided. Find out more.
Find out more about the benefits of the NFER Tests range for years 1-6 here, or order for delivery in 10 working days.
Diagnostic guidance example materials
Click on the samples below to view the types of diagnostic guidance you will find in the teacher guides.
Year 1 Reading paper 1 mark scheme with diagnostic guidance (spring)
Year 2 Reading paper 2 mark scheme (spring)
Year 2 Reasoning mark scheme with diagnostic guidance (spring)
Year 2 Arithmetic mark scheme with diagnostic guidance (spring)
Year 4 Grammar and punctuation mark scheme with diagnostic guidance (autumn)
Year 5 Mathematics marks scheme with diagnostic guidance (spring)
Year 6 Reasoning mark scheme with diagnostic guidance
Year 6 Arithmetic mark scheme with diagnostic guidance
Year 6 Grammar and punctuation diagnostic guidance
Year 6 Spelling diagnostic guidance
To view the quality and content typical of all NFER Test materials, all supported by a free online analysis tool, you can download our sample materials brochure here or view a full range sample materials for years 1-6 here.