How Our Assessments Work

Assessment

Overview

Understand how Spellcaster's assessment system works, including the two ways to set up an assessment, manual phase selection and the automatic placement screener and how learner levels are determined.

In Depth

Two Ways to Assess

Spellcaster offers two ways to set up an assessment for your learners:

Manual Assessment — You choose the phase of the scope and sequence to assess the learner within.
Automatic Placement Test — Spellcaster runs an initial screener to determine the right phase, then completes the full assessment automatically.

Both methods are designed to place learners at the right level without requiring them to work through every single level of the scope and sequence, which would be too intensive and time-consuming for the learner.

Setting Up a Manual Assessment

When you set up an assessment manually, you select which phase of the Spellcaster scope and sequence you want the learner to be assessed within.

How It Works:

Choose the phase of the scope and sequence you want the learner assessed in
The assessment covers every grapheme/phoneme correspondence within that phase
The learner continues until they finish the assessment

Automatic Placement:

When creating a manual assessment, you can choose whether Spellcaster automatically places the learner at the assessed level, or simply returns the results without changing their level
You can manually adjust the learner's level at any point after the assessment is complete

How the Screener Works

When you choose to automatically create assessments when adding learners, Spellcaster runs an initial screener to determine which phase to assess them against before determining their start level.

The Screener:

The screener presents 11 words covering several commonly mistaken graphemes from phases 1 to 3 of the Spellcaster scope and sequence
The learner may not need to complete all 11 words — the screener stops early once it has enough information to determine the right phase

How Phase Selection Works:

If the learner gets 2 or more incorrect from the phase 1 questions, they carry on to complete the full phase 1 assessment
The same applies for phase 2 — 2 or more incorrect from the phase 2 questions leads to the full phase 2 assessment
If they answer all screener questions without getting 2 wrong in phase 1 or 2, they continue to complete the full phase 3 assessment

What Happens Next:

Once the screener identifies the appropriate phase, Spellcaster automatically runs the complete assessment for that phase
The full assessment covers every grapheme/phoneme correspondence within the determined phase
The learner's final level is based on how they perform in the phase-specific assessment

After the Assessment

Regardless of which method you use, you always retain full control over the learner's placement after the assessment is complete.

Assessment results are available immediately upon completion
You can manually adjust the learner's level at any time
You can run further assessments on demand

Reference

Knowledge Base