Did you administer the early Math Benchmark Tests?

If you did, you really need to look for trends by using the Assessment Results Report. 

The results at the top of the page will help you get an idea about class trends. It will help you identify the success of your school's math program, but it really isn't a good place to make big decisions about individual student ability and achievement. Keep in mind that each student had only one question about each skill that was tested. Most of us would like a bigger sample used to see if we knew what we were being held accountable for. 

The second part of this report will identify the students who have not yet taken the assessment. The decision is yours, but as the year progresses and you have taught more of the material that some of your students had not been taught before taking the test, the results will start to be diluted. You may want to examine the results of the assessment now rather than waiting for those results to come in.

The last part of this report may be the most important section. The bar graph at the bottom of the page shows class results by skill. These bars show the distribution of student performance in each of these skills. You can find which students performed well on a skill and which didn't. This might not be as important as looking at the class performance. One suggestion is to take a look at the skills that you would have expected your students would not have done well on. If this is a skill that they have never been taught, the results might be taken as interesting, but not necessarily important since there would be little expectation of high performance. The next group to look at might be the skills that you have already taught this year. If your students, as a class, did pretty well on these skills, you have some indication of how well the class mastered this skill. If your results are mixed on one or more of these skills, you should probably prepare another assessment that has enough questions on this skill, or these skills to be reliable, and not so many that you have to give up a lot of class time for the administration of the test. Reteaching these skills will not be easier any time later in the year. Finally, look at the skills you really expect that students should have a solid foundation in when they come to your class. If your students do have that foundation, great. If, from the results of the assessment, they don't appear to have that understanding, you should probably think about another assessment for these skills too. You need to make a decision about how you will address these deficiencies. 

This is what formative assessments are all about. It is a matter of making adjustments to your educational plan. Sometimes you will be able to shorten the time that you had planned to use for teaching a concept, and sometimes you will have to go back and teach something that was not in the plan at all, but which is essential for the understanding of the entire course. 

Nobody said it would be easy, but without the information provided, it would be easy to just move on without knowing why some students just didn't get it.