Focus Education NZ

The ICAS sitting period is coming to a close, and results for ICAS assessments have started to be released. Digital Technologies and English results are now available online, with prospective medal winners being finalized soon.

A significant aspect of the ICAS assessments is the detailed report they give on your child’s strengths and weaknesses in each subject. In this post, we explore how to access and make the most of your child’s ICAS assessments results.

Access the results

To access results, go to the results portal at this link. You will need to enter your child’s ICAS TAP-ID and PIN. Your school will normally provide this information. If your child sat ICAS at Focus Education, we will email you with the TAP-ID and PIN to access your child’s results when each subject results are released.

ICAS Assessments provide a FAQ document for the Results portal which you can access here. This document walks you through accessing the Results Portal and viewing results by subject, year, and questions. You can also download a PDF of your child’s certificate from the Results Portal.

Find useful results

Perhaps the most useful area of the results is the Summary area. Here, your child’s performance is compared across the different skill areas of the subject and to the middle 80% and average of your child’s region (New Zealand and Pacific).

This summary page allows you to quickly see which areas your child is strong in and which they need extra support with.

For example, the Digital Technologies student below performed well in the skill areas of digital systems, programming and spreadsheets & databases. They were less successful in graphics & multimedia, word processing and in particular internet & email.

To support your child’s progress in these areas, we suggest drilling into the Questions area and looking at the questions in the skill areas your child struggled with the most. In particular, look at the easiest questions that your child answered incorrectly.

As an example, the student did not get the answer below correct. You can see that this is question 27 and covered the skill area of internet & email. The student was asked to select the most accurate website. The last number gives the percentage of students in the region who answered this question correctly.

Use the results

Now that you have gathered the skill areas and more specific skills which your child struggled with, you can use this information to help your child make progress in the subject. We suggest several strategies, depending on what is most practical for you:

1. Talk to your child’s school teacher about the skill areas your child needs to improve on. Establish how the teacher will teach these areas in the coming terms. Teachers will normally be alert to the weaknesses of their students and be looking for opportunities to help their students progress.
2. Seek out extra-curricular opportunities for your child to work on the skill areas you’ve identified. For many subjects, this will involve extra tuition. Make sure your child’s tutor is aware of your child’s ICAS performance and the specific areas you’d like them to work on. A good tutor who is knowledgeable in their subject will be able to select activities and resources to support these goals.
3. Spend time with your child doing activities that require the skill areas you’ve identified. For example, if your child can improve on their understanding of reliable information on websites, show them how you navigate a search page and select where you get information from.

An opportunity for growth

Students can become anxious or stressed when reviewing their assessment results, especially if they want to do well and make you proud. This is an opportunity to model a growth mindset for your child. Rather than frame the assessment as a test which determines their self-esteem and worth, show that you are looking at the assessment as an opportunity to examine how to tweak your child’s education so that they can enjoy their successes more. The more you involve your child in this process, the more they can take ownership of their own learning, improving their motivation and allowing them to feel genuinely proud of their achievements.