The QuickSmart Basic Skills Assessor (QBSA) became available to all QuickSmart Numeracy and Literacy schools with an active licence in January 2023. This product was developed by the IT Team from the SiMERR National Research Centre, UNE; the home of the QuickSmart suite of programs.  

The QBSA replaces the previously used OZCAAS application as the assessment component of a QuickSmart lesson. Both applications are designed to be used by the instructor alongside the student, with the microphone recording the response time, and the instructor marking the answer as correct or incorrect. 

The QBSA has several key features that should be mentioned. 

 

The QBSA does not remove the ‘outliers’ from the dataset.   

In statistics, an outlier is a data point that differs significantly from other observations.  

There are three causes of outliers: 

1. Data entry or experimental measurement errors; 
2. Sampling problems; 
3. Natural variation.  

Points ‘1.’ and ‘2.’ are not relevant to the QuickSmart context. If an ‘experimental measurement error’ occurs, e.g., a distraction occurs and the student’s response time that is recorded is not a true representation of their response time, the item should be ‘flushed’. In this case the item will be removed from the data set. It should be noted that the QBSA has improved detection of speech compared to OZCAAS, which simply detected sound. Therefore noises, such as a door slamming, will not be interpreted by the computer as the learner speaking, as the QBSA uses speech detection and is listening for phonemic changes. It is also important to note that there are no ‘sampling problems’ in QuickSmart as the same pairs of students continue until they have completed the program.

The third cause of outliers, ‘natural variation’, is relevant to the QuickSmart context. Keeping these natural variations in the dataset means that instructors can see which number facts the student is taking an exceptionally long time to answer. Working on these number facts, the ones that the student finds most difficult, is going to help the student to progress more quickly. It is also important to note that these natural variants will usually occur when the student is working on a new operation. As the student learns the number facts from this operation, the exceptionally long response times will not occur on a regular basis, i.e., there will not be any outliers. 

A common occurrence with OZCAAS is that the program will indicate that the student has achieved 100% accuracy and the instructor knows that they scored at least one item as incorrect. This results from the item being classified as an ‘outlier’, as the response time was much longer than the other response times. This meant that the item was removed from the dataset. Instructors have been faced with the difficult task of explaining this to their student.  

QBSA, however, will not remove these items. Instructors will be able to identify the items with the longer response times and assist the student to decrease their response time for these items. 

 

The spacebar is not able to be used in the QBSA 

The use of the spacebar within OZCAAS was an alternative to the use of the microphone for recording a student’s response time in situations where the background noise was excessive. The use of the spacebar, however, introduces additional time and variability to the student’s response time. This means it is more difficult for the student to meet the targets with the QuickSmart program, and any adjustment to accommodate this is difficult due to the variation in response times between different instructors.  

Therefore, the use of the spacebar is not an option within the QBSA. Instead, the program, as discussed above, has improved speech detection and will not record a response to sounds that are not voices. The exclusive use of the microphone will ensure response times are collected accurately and in a consistent manner. The use of a directional microphone or headset is recommended if the room has other teachers or students who may be speaking. 

 

Extensive data is automatically available from the QBSA 

As the QBSA is an online tool, it saves the data each time the student logs in and completes a task using the software. This provides extensive information to instructors that was not available with OZCAAS. This additional data assists instructors in determining the areas of weakness for individual students and inform progression. Instructors can download extensive reports, including a question-by-question breakdown for students in an Excel spreadsheet format. There is therefore substantial data on which to base decisions, such as where to start students or what Focus Facts to move to for each student on an ongoing basis.  

In addition, the data for the pre- and post- test data from the QBSA does not need to be manually entered for students. This saves time for instructors and coordinators, who used to enter this data at the beginning and end of the year when using OZCAAS.