Overview: The Numeracy Diagnostic Assessment (DA) is an online assessment accessed through the QuickSmart Portal. It is cost-effective and efficient tool for assessing the basic numeracy skills of large numbers of students.
A focus on the assessment of syllabus outcomes does not identify the missing, underlying numeracy skills required for success with higher-level mathematical tasks and the attainment of syllabus outcomes. Mastery of the underlying skills involves not merely being able to calculate an answer correctly but includes automaticity, the capacity to recall correct answers automatically, effortlessly and unavoidably. Automaticity with the underlying basic numeracy skills improves access to working memory resources necessary to engage successfully in higher-cognitive tasks.
QuickSmart Numeracy Diagnostic Assessment Description
The QuickSmart Numeracy Diagnostic Assessment:
- assesses a student’s automaticity with basic number facts;
- records the average Response Time and Accuracy for a student’s answers to 30 randomly generated combinations of 0 – 12 for each fundamental arithmetic operation;
- allows each student to attempt up to five rounds of the Diagnostic Assessment tool over a school year;
- identifies, in the first round, the needs for intervention in basic numeracy skills among a potentially large number of students;
- establishes a baseline against which improvement can be measured over time;
- allows up to four further rounds of Diagnostic Assessment that progressively measure improvements in students’ basic numeracy skills throughout the school year; and
- allows schools to group students into multiple Diagnostic Assessment ‘classes’ to collate students with different needs or instructional regimes.
Online and Downloadable Reports
Online and downloadable reports for ‘classes’ and/or individual students are available to instructors. The reports may be selected to display:
- a snapshot from a round of assessments; or
- progress over several rounds of assessments.
Class Reports display charts that show the results for all the learners in a class. These reports can be selected to display:
- all the individual results;
- the averaged results; and
- results for each Assessment level (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).
Learner Reports display the charts of the results for each individual learner, as are available to the learners themselves.
Download Reports provide a document, e.g., Excel spreadsheet, with complete details of a learner’s results for a round of Diagnostic Assessment. The details include accuracy, response time and errors for every question in each assessment.
Numeracy Diagnostic Assessment Program Costs
The QuickSmart Numeracy Diagnostic Assessment is available for purchase by ALL schools in Australia. There are no professional development sessions associated with the Diagnostic Assessment, however user guides are available after a school has registered.
- 30 licences*: $75 (plus 10% GST)
- 100 licences*: $225 (plus 10% GST)
- 200 licences*: $400 (plus 10% GST)
Licences can be purchased through the form on this page.
*Licences are no longer usable at the end of the current school year. For example: if a batch of licences is purchased in March 2023, they will expire on 31st December 2023. However, if they are purchased after September, they will not expire until the following December. For example: if a batch of licences is purchased in October 2023, they will expire on 31st December 2024.