Al Forqan International School in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, was formed in 1996 as a National Saudi Arabian School and developed their American International Program in 2011. Dr Attar (CEO) and Dr Soliman (Academic Supervisor) recognised the potential of digital curriculum to transform teaching and learning and, in 2018, became early adopters of Apex and Edmentum’s digital curricula. These programs have been exceptionally successful and Edmentum became a trusted partner that they consult with on their future developments.

This year their priority was to identify an integrated assessment solution that combined diagnostic and formative assessments and provided unique personal learning paths of content for each and every student. Dr. Attar wanted to embed such a system because he understood how it would ‘help each individual learner to flourish and reach their full potential’. Additionally, Dr Soliman was looking for data reports that would help them ‘demonstrate to inspection authorities, accreditation bodies, owners and parents the success they are adding as a school’. They had previously used a variety of assessment and learning platforms including IXL,
NWEA MAP and Cognia’s formative assessments but were looking for one system that provided a fully integrated solution.

Edmentum Exact Path is this solution. It is currently used by 5 million learners around the world to improve their Math, Reading and English Language Arts results from K-12. This year, Learning Oasis began a pilot of Exact Path in their boys’ school with grades 3 -9.

Exact Path: The Diagnostic

Exact Path uses an adaptive diagnostic assessment to provide a valid measure of attainment and growth so you can easily see your learners’ strengths and weaknesses. It pinpoints where your students are ready to learn and who requires targeted intervention supports. It has been built by experienced, in-house subject matter experts and psychometricians and delivers National Percentile Rank, grade level proficiency, Lexile® and Quantile® measures.

Exact Path: The Learning Path 

The learning path is the critically important component and what distinguishes Exact Path from being just a diagnostic assessment. Exact Path uses the diagnostic data to create an individual learning path for each and every student. The learning path is broken down into individual skills from the standards and each
skill contains a lesson, a practice opportunity, and a formative assessment quiz. The content is at the right level for each student, engaging and pedagogically appropriate. Feedback is immediate which means learners know whether they are on the right path for success immediately. The formative assessment is
automatically marked for the teacher and the results populate a live data dashboard that teachers use to monitor student progress.

Supporting Cognia Accreditation Visits

Exact Path is helping Al Forqan to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning that is taking place in the school which is a key component of the Cognia Accreditation process. By using the learner centred data, Exact Path provides every learner with the opportunity to succeed to their highest potential. Each learner has a unique learning journey within their subjects and Exact Path helps learners to navigate their own journey of improvement and growth. Dr Soliman is using the data reports to ‘make decisions about learners’ growth and it enables him to regularly evaluate instructional programs and organizational conditions to improve instruction and advance learning’. He is able to compare data at a variety of different scales across schools, within his school, by grade level, class and at an individual level.

Impact 

Dr Soliman of Al Forqan celebrates the fact that it ‘provides insightful analysis, informed action and improved outcomes and believes that the system is like having a one-to-one learning support teacher with every student’. 

He particularly likes the fact that it is ‘available anytime, anywhere and teachers can assign additional resources to support and stretch students and use the system to deliver their on-grade level lessons in addition to targeted intervention’.

His teachers, like teachers in classrooms around the world, have always found differentiation one of their most difficult tasks. Exact Path does this for you and ‘provides students with an individual action plan to improve attainment and grow which is brilliant for differentiation within the classroom’.

His teachers have really embraced Exact Path because it helps them to ‘to improve results, personalise learning, provide immediate feedback, reduce their marking and workloads, free up time for them to focus on providing intervention and teaching’.

English as a Foreign Language Learners

Exact Path is having a very significant impact with EFL and ELL. All of Al Forqan’s students learn English as a foreign language. Exact Path focuses on the 5 key elements of phonological awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension identified in the science of reading, and as a result, the
improvements in attainment and growth have been significant.

Dr Soliman confirms that ‘we have seen scaled score growth of 215 points which have equated to National Percentile Rank improvement from 17 to 61 or better in our grade 5 students in 4 months’.

The table below is for reading. It has been anonymized but clearly demonstrates the growth that is occurring across a variety of different grade levels.

Exact Path is also having a significant impact across English Language Arts and Math, as well. The table below shows the original diagnostic results of a grade 4 boy in Al Forqan school. His NPR scores were far from exceptional to begin with. (NPR compares a student to US norms.) An NPR of 66% means he is better than 66% of the children in his grade level in the US but worse than 34%, so English Language Arts (ELA) was a significant weakness.

Student X then spent a significant amount of time in his Exact Path Learning Path. He spent 11 hours in Math, 22 hours in ELA and 21 hours in Reading. He mastered in total 93 skills in his learning path.

In the table below, the second diagnostic results have improved significantly. He has completed all the grade 4 standards and is now working on grade 5 content. He is now in the top 2% nationally in Math, the top 11% in Reading and the top 3% in ELA. He has had phenomenal growth and is now attaining great results.

The Future

Al Forqan International School are going to roll out Exact Path to all grades within the school and highly recommend it to any American International School looking to improve growth and attainment and any National schools looking to improve their English Language Learning. It is helping their teachers to improve their teaching, close learning gaps, and accelerate learning in their school in Saudi Arabia.

Al Forqan are thankful for the advice and introduction to Edmentum and Exact Path which they received from Learning Oasis Education Consultancy who partner and co-operate with Edmentum in Saudi Arabia.