Learning and Teaching in Practice/Personalised learning/Diagnostic assessment

The term diagnosis is often used with the sense of a detailed definition of a problem, such as a medical condition.

Diagnostic assessment involves the detailed definition not of a problem but of a learner's skills and knowledge. Unlike summative assessment, diagnostic assessment generally takes place near the beginning of a course of study, and is not used for certification. Instead, it is used to get a detailed 'snapshot' of the learner's current set of skills.

Diagnostic assessment is widely used to develop a learner's literacy profile - their current levels of skills in relation to pre-determined standards in a range of literacy areas.

The example below shows an extract from the literacy standards published by the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority:



Note: New Zealand has developed similar standards for literacy and numeracy but these are not freely reproducible here.