Inside the free check: 20 questions, 18 skills

What it is, in concrete terms

The math check is twenty questions drawn from a bank that covers eighteen skills, and it takes about twelve minutes. It is free and does not ask for a card. You pick the child's year band before it starts, which sets where the difficulty opens rather than what the check is allowed to look at.

The questions are short and plain. The value of a digit in a four-digit number. A multiplication fact. An integer addition with a negative in it. Several fraction items, including simplifying, adding with the same denominator and adding with different ones. Converting a fraction to a decimal, a percentage of an amount, a fraction expressed as a percentage. Multiplying and dividing fractions. A ratio-sharing question. Then three algebra items: collecting like terms, substituting a value, and solving a two-step equation.

Why twenty questions can say anything useful

Because it is not trying to cover the year. It is deliberately spread across a chain of skills that sit underneath each other, so the point of interest is not the score but where along the chain the answers stop being right.

The mechanism that does the work is what happens after a wrong answer. Certain items have prerequisites attached to them, and missing one sends the check backward rather than onward.

So a child who cannot do 1/3 + 1/4 is not simply marked wrong on fractions. The check asks for the lowest common multiple of 3 and 4, asks for an equivalent fraction, and asks for 3/8 + 2/8. If those three come back fine, the problem is the combining step. If the lowest common multiple is the one that falls over, the fraction lesson was never the issue.

Specific wrong answers mean specific things

Several items carry tagged misconceptions, which is a different thing from being wrong. Adding the denominators together. Subtracting the denominators. Choosing a common denominator that is not common. Simplifying with the wrong highest common factor. Losing a sign when a negative is involved.

A child making one of these is not guessing. They are following a rule that is consistent, confidently applied and incorrect, and that pattern responds to being shown the contradiction rather than to being given more of the same questions.

What comes back at the end

Each skill the check touched gets a score out of 100 and lands in one of three bands: mastered at 80 or above, practicing between 50 and 79, and still learning below 50. Alongside that you get the strongest skills, a short list of the ones needing attention, a single biggest opportunity, and an overall average.

The result also records the plain arithmetic of the session — how many questions were asked, how many were answered, how many were right, how many were skipped. Skipped is worth reading separately from wrong. A run of skips in one area usually means avoidance, and avoidance is information.

What it is not

It is not a diagnosis. It does not detect dyscalculia, a learning disability or an attention difficulty, and nobody should treat a low band as a medical or educational finding. It is not aligned to any state's standards or any district's pacing guide, so it cannot tell you whether your child is on track for a particular test. It is not a placement instrument and no school will accept it as one.

If the result worries you, the next conversation is with the teacher, and the check is useful there mainly as a way to ask a precise question instead of a vague one.

How to actually run it

Sit nearby and do not help. The temptation to nudge is strong and it destroys the only thing you came for, which is an honest picture. Twelve minutes at a table, not in a car, and not at the end of a long homework fight — a tired child produces a result about tiredness.

Tell the child what it is beforehand: not a test, nothing goes to school, it is looking for what to practice. Children who think they are being judged skip; children who know the point tend to try the hard ones.

Questions about the check

Is it really free, and what do you want in return?

It is free and there is no card. What it leads to is an account and a practice path, which is the business — saying that plainly is better than pretending the check exists in isolation.

My child rushed it. Is the result garbage?

Probably partly. A result that disagrees sharply with what you see at home is worth repeating another day rather than believing, and the two attempts together usually tell you which one was the anomaly.

Can I do it for a much younger or much older child?

The difficulty band spans roughly upper elementary through 8th grade. Outside that range the questions will be either trivially easy or unfairly hard, and the result stops meaning much.

It said one skill is the biggest opportunity. Do we only do that?

Start there, because it is chosen as the lowest-scoring skill that other skills depend on. But treat it as a starting point and not a verdict, especially if it contradicts what the teacher has been telling you.

Related

• Adaptive practice — what happens after the check
• Math support — how the subject is organized here
• Tracking math progress — reading a second result against the first