It gives me great pleasure to unveil a sneak preview of three brand-new, exciting features that are coming to Diagnostic Questions in the new academic year.

As we have said from the outset, we want to keep the core functionality of Diagnostic Questions free to all users. That means it will remain free for teachers to access thousands of questions, create your own questions, build quizzes, assign these quizzes to your classes, view your students’ answers and explanations, and compare these results to other classes. Likewise, it will remain free for students to use the website to revise independently, answering thousands of questions and benefiting from reading explanations written by students all around the world until they find one that makes sense to them.

We have already seen how these free features have helped teachers and students from all over the world identify, understand and resolve key misconceptions. We currently have over 6,000 free maths questions, and close to 1 million answers, giving us a unique insight into how students learning. We now cover all other subjects as well, so please tell your colleagues about us!

To build this into a sustainable business, we are developing three brand new Premium features that we believe will make Diagnostic Questions even more powerful:

1. Teacher-Student Dialogue and Feedback

We are acutely aware of the Ofsted requirement for personalised, effective dialogue and feedback between student and teacher. This is often lacking in online products. So, we are building a system whereby when a student answers a question and gives their explanation, you as the teacher are able to respond with personalised feedback and then set a follow-up question to check the misconception has been resolved. This will form a digital record of progress which can be printed off at any time.

2. Data Insights

The more your students answer questions and give explanations, the more the website can tell you about their understanding of mathematics. Whilst you can already learn about your classes’ understanding of a given question or quiz, we can do so much more. So, at the touch of a button we will be able to tell you things like:
• What are the 5 more important areas for improvement for your class?
• Which students should you pair together to get effective peer-to-peer learning?
• What specific areas should each student focus on?
• What evidence is there of the progress your class has made over a set period of time?
We believe that these insights, and more that will follow, will help make teaching and learning more effective than ever.

3. Reporting

At the click of a button you will be able to generate a detailed, personalised, insightful report on your class, an individual student, or a given cohort of students. So, imagine you want to know how Year 7 girls are performing in Algebra, compared to Year 7 boys, then we can do that. Or you want a detailed, personalised summary, including key action points, for each student in your Year 10 class, then that is no problem as well.

We have a special, early-bird price for these features of £500 for your entire school, covering all subjects, for the 2015/16 academic year.

We hope that these features will make Diagnostic Questions, and the insights you can gain from the website, even more powerful, and this have a greater positive effect on assessment, teaching and learning.

If you want to know more, or have any questions, or want to place an order, just drop us Simon and I an email via this link