Doodle Age is a way to measure progress through the curriculum objectives in the Doodle programme. It correlates to the average age of students using Doodle who are working on that concept. If a child has a DoodleAge of 7.5, they will be working at the level of an average 7-and-a-half year old, within the Doodle programme. We calculate this by looking at the point a child is in their work programme in terms of the questions they are currently being asked. We then compare this to the average age of other children in our system who are at a similar point in their programme.

Doodle is there to revise previously learnt topics and remedy any gaps in understanding - for the majority of children within our work programme, this means revisiting work from previous year groups in order to fill in these gaps. This is perfectly normal and what we would expect to see! A child with a DoodleAge of 7.5 will be covering year 2 objectives.

DoodleAge will be most accurate when a child is using the programme regularly as it will understand and reflect a child's confidence in a large variety of areas due to the amount of concepts that are covered. If a child doesn't use the programme regularly or if there are lengths of time when the programme isn't in use, then the algorithm that powers the questions will pick up from where it left off. This can result in the DoodleAge being lower than we'd expect and the programme being too easy.

The important thing is that the work programme is right for the child - by that we mean they are finding it not too difficult and not too easy. We always recommend that you look at Work Programmes > View understanding. This indicates whether the programme is working right for the student or not. Doodle will determine that their programme is sufficiently challenging when a child reaches approximately 80% accuracy - this means the child is getting enough questions right that they are building their confidence, but are also being sufficiently challenged. If they are finding the work programme too easy or too difficult we recommend setting a Baseline Assessment - more information on what that entails and how to do this can be found here.