‘When students are  assessed using high-quality and targeted questions, it shows’: Using MESHA data to guide Maths team decision-making

Most secondary schools run extension Maths classes for their top-achieving students in Years 7 to 10. For Ned Holland, the Learning Leader Mathematics at Clonard College and his team, identifying the students for extension proved an ongoing challenge. The Independent Catholic school for girls in Geelong runs one extension class at each year level from Years 8 to 10.

“Our extension class is one way we support students into higher-level Maths in Year 12. The Year 9 class feeds into 10 Advanced, and then into VCE Maths Methods and Specialist. It creates a pathway to really extend those students in the junior years”, says Ned.

Selection into the extension classes is competitive, and many teachers were struggling with the data available to do this.

As Ned shares, “We had a lot of teachers frustrated with PAT data, especially in guiding who should be in the extension class. A student would appear to be quite average when looking at their PAT data, but then they would go on to do really well in VCE. I think part of it is that these students are good learners, so when students are assessed using high-quality and targeted questions, it shows. Whereas tests like PAT can feel like an IQ test because the questions are adaptive and they’re not directly linked to the curriculum.”

Using MESHA for a truer student comparison

“With MESHA, teachers were immediately onboard. As every student sits the same test, they felt it was really fair. The MESHA questions also look more like what we do in the class day-to-day, rather than drawing on just natural, holistic math ability, as other assessments do. We agreed 40 minutes was not much to give up for what we’d get back.”

The need for an assessment that would give the College a true comparison of students drew Ned to MESHA. His team wanted a better indicator to guide the selection of students for extension, as well as give the team feedback on student gaps and areas they could improve.

MESHA is deliberately non-adaptive. All students within a year level sit the same 40-minute test within a 10-day testing window, and insights are delivered promptly to help impact current teaching.

Taking immediate action with MESHA insights

In Term 3, 2025, the Clonard College piloted MESHA with 120 Year 8 students and used the insights to take immediate action.

Five students who had been rejected for the extension class because of their low-scoring PAT data outperformed most students in the extension class. This prompted teachers to look again at these students’ results and class placement.

As one of the students describes, “We did the test in class, in like just 1 period, it wasn’t stressful. I guess I did pretty well as it helped the teachers put me into the extension class. I’m really happy about that.”

Addressing patterns of conceptual misunderstanding across the cohort based on MESHA insights was also a pivotal key action, as Ned describes:

“Pretty much straight after MESHA, we noticed a few areas where students clearly hadn’t grasped, including fractions. So we revisited these across classes. We also realised that we needed to focus on some spaced recall because we could see with our MESHA data that the questions that students struggled with were the topics that we did in term one. So that highlighted to us, ‘Okay, we need to keep going back over things because perhaps they're not retaining it through a whole year.”

The College has semester exams from Year 9 onwards across subjects, meaning revisiting previous concepts as part of exam revision is built into teaching and learning.

Spaced retrieval was not initially an integrated approach at the College across Years 7 and 8. However, based on the insights from MESHA, Ned and the team built spaced recall into their daily lesson plan. They now start each Year 7 and 8 Maths lesson with a challenge question or a general question that combines multiple units or topics, as a way to revisit concepts and build general Maths ability.

Supporting Clonard College's strategic priorities

Clonard continues with MESHA as it is well-aligned with their strategic literary and numeracy priorities. Ned plans to continue to roll out MESHA across Years 7 to 10 so that he can use the data to triangulate what they’re seeing from NAPLAN and PAT.

“As a leadership team we really need to know what we're doing well and what we need to improve. With MESHA, the fact that the questions are tied to curriculum strands, means we can go back and see links and the gaps related to teaching. That's really important and it’s not something we’re getting otherwise.”