Time for some review...

It's easy to assume that the people who have been trained have an understanding of the Skills Iowa programs, but the training happens pretty fast, and it happens at a time of the year that you have a lot on your mind. So, with that in mind, let's review the purposes of each of our programs.

Assessment Center

Assessment Center is a program which is used to create multiple choice assessments which can be taken online or offline. When taken online, these assessments are graded automatically and the results are broken down by performance in each of the skills. The reports can show you how a class is doing on a given skill or set of skills or you can look at individual students to see where there are gaps in understanding. The testing can be done at any grade level from 3rd through 12th in Reading (ELA), Language Arts or Math. When this program is used for formative assessment, student achievement can be raised dramatically when coupled with judicial usage of the reports and an eye toward remediation. Multiple assessments can be made over the same subjects.

Skills Tutor

Skills Tutor contains pretests, interactive tutorial lessons, quizzes, posttests and problem solving lessons in reading comprehension, math, language arts, science, information skills, workforce readiness skills and vocabulary. There is only one lesson per skill at a given grade level. The lessons are divided into general performance levels. Level LL is for a lower level third grade reader and is only used in Reading Comprehension. The other levels are A: 3rd/4th grade, B: 5th/6th grade, C: 7th/8th grade and lessons such as Reading with no level behind them which are created for high school level students. Additionally, at the elementary level, Beginning Language Arts and Beginning Math are offered for struggling students.

There is a full set of reports that allow teachers and administrators to monitor student performance from an entire school view to the view of an individual student.

Skills Iowa

Skills Iowa is the name of the project. Each school is assigned to a project leader who does the training and support for that school. Typically, each school has a refresher training or an initial training at the beginning of the school year, and then follow up training sessions are offered to schools as they need them. The project leaders are also available to answer questions about the use of the programs and to help the schools and their teachers in utilizing the programs. 

Skills Iowa suggests using the Assess, Analyze, Act model. Teachers can Assess in Assessment Center, Analyze there with the reports and Act using Skills Tutor.

Questions

If you have questions, please contact your project leader or Susie Olesen, the project director.