Diagnostic Questions improve teaching and learning through a bank of Computing Diagnostic Questions, grouped into quizzes, for KS3-4 students. The free tools are designed to reduce teacher workload, and give an insight into any students' misconceptions. CAS has been working with partner Eedi to develop diagnostic questions, and a CAS Inspire webinar on Wednesday 7 October, is the chance to find out more. We also spoke to Harriet Walters at Eedi ahead of the webinar:

I’m Harriet, the Community Manager at Eedi, one of CAS’s partners. CAS and Eedi have been working together on the Quantum project since 2016. The goal of our partnership is to develop a large corpus of high-quality diagnostic questions in computing, as a free resource to improve teaching and learning in computing. Our mission at Eedi is to help every child build the skills and confidence to thrive in a rapidly changing world. We have developed a bank of diagnostic questions to support the computing curriculum across KS3 and KS4 that improve the quality of teaching and learning and save teachers time and reduce their workload. 

What are diagnostic questions?

"Diagnostic questions are designed to help identify, and crucially understand students’ mistakes and misconceptions in an efficient and accurate manner." - Craig Barton, Head of Education and Co Founder at Eedi. 

Diagnostic Questions to identify what each student doesn't understand and why they're going wrong. They are designed such that each incorrect answer reveals a unique misconception. Knowing each student's misconceptions lets you support them better.

How has it been used successfully previously? Can you give examples?

We've worked with 50,000+ teachers, children, and parents worldwide. What other teachers have to say:

"Both the students as well as I absolutely love the fact that it is easily set up, accessible, really meaningful to their learning and that they can see their progress as well as which areas I need to re-visit with them. A fantastic tool."

“Self-marking, amazing insights, allows me to build future lessons, great for report writing and parent interviews."

"Excellent platform that is intuitive to use both for the pupils and the teachers with superb ability to quickly analyse the result of work and provide clear strengths and weaknesses."

What gap does it fill for teachers?

Diagnostic Questions is a world leading assessment tool that provides detailed insights into student understanding in a fraction of the time, simultaneously reducing your workload and improving student results and confidence. Our continuous system of misconception identification provides teachers with the foresight they need to intervene effectively in students' learning. 

How does it benefit students/learning?

It benefits students learning by identifying where they are going wrong through fun quizzes, and sets them on the right track. It allows teachers to see not only where they are going wrong, but why they are going wrong. We provide easy reports on how your class did in each quiz on loads of topics and the most common misconceptions. 

How can teachers find out more?

You can find out more by visiting this page. It has everything you need to know about our computing content and links to all the content available to you. I'll be explaining more about how to use Diagnostic Questions’ quizzes in monthly emails - you can sign up here.You can also join my colleague Iris Hulls who'll be leading a CAS Inspire introductory webinar on Wednesday 7 October.