Skills Tutor Changes

There are only a few changes in Skills Tutor this year, but one change can mean some real opportunities for teachers.

The change comes in the Add Assignment command. This year there are three new choices to make in a Skills Tutor assignment.

Change #1: The teacher can now choose to force a student to follow the order of the assignment lessons. This means that students cannot jump ahead to another lesson in the list until they have met the proficiency settings on this lesson. Teachers can choose to control this, or leave it checked so the program will behave as it has in the past.

Change #2: Teachers can choose to have a pretest assign lessons based on student performance or choose not to have the pretest assign lessons. This is a big change for Reading Comprehension and Reading Vocabulary where the pretests used to result in the assignment of all lessons that followed. Many teachers are now creating an assignment that just contains the pretest in Reading Comprehension. With this information, they can make choices about how to differentiate future lessons.

Change #3: Teachers can choose how many times the program will recommend an activity. The number of recommendations can be set between one to five times. Three is the default number.

We feel that these changes have created a great deal of flexibility for teachers. If you haven't noticed the new features, take a look the next time you make an assignment.