Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Tips From the Blog

If you frequent the Skills Iowa Blog, you see some articles that address immediate problems and concerns, and there are others that address situations that come up year after year. It's these articles that we have reformatted as PDF files and placed them on the Skills Iowa Web Page for you to download and use.

Check it out.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Formative Assessment

This blog has been going for a while now, and some of the earlier posts are sort of buried. From time to time, we'll bring one or more of them up for your viewing.

Assessment Center Reports


Assessment Center has six reports available to teachers. Each of them is useful in a different way, and each raises and answers different questions about the same data.

The first report listed is the Assessment Results report. This report gives the scores on a single assessment, breaks the scores down into the four performance groups, gives the ability to drill down to see a single student's assessment, and shows the performance data on each tested skill. This report gives a quick look at what we just did, and allows us to make decisions quickly about the tested skills.

The next report in the list is a Compare Assessments report. This report will allow you to show a comparison of how many students performed in a given performance group or groups in selected assessments as well as showing the entire distribution of total scores on a single assessment. For example, if you were interested in showing how many students had scored in the top two proficiency groupings on two assessments, you would merely click the Meets Standards and Exceeds Standards buttons above the list of assessments on this report page. Next, you would click the assessments you want to compare. Your report will show the newest assessment on the left. You may want to run this report more than once using different choices of performance groups to show the entire picture.

The third report is called the Question Details report. This report provides an item analysis of the assessment. With this, you get the ability to see not only which skill caused your students problems, but also which question or questions caused students problems. Any incorrect answer displays the incorrect choice. The correct answers are shown by a + sign. At the bottom of the columns is a series of buttons with the letter "I" displayed. These icons will allow the teacher to see which skill was tested by this question. To see the skill, just let your cursor hover over the appropriate icon.

The fourth report is called the Overall Skill Performance report. This report allows the teacher to see how a student has scored on all tests given and taken in a given subject area. The selection of ELA, Language Arts or Math must be made when building this report. The teacher must also choose from a list of Assessment Types. If the teacher is evaluating assessments that he/she has created, he/she should choose Teacher Created. If one is looking at the performance on the benchmark assessments, you would choose Administrator Created. The resulting report shows a multicolored performance bar graph. Clicking on each of these bars will show the grouping of students on each of the tested skills in all of the assessments used so far in this class. This aggregate report gives a look at how students have done on a series of assessments. This report is not available immediately after taking the assessment. It will be available within 24 hours.

The fifth report in the list is called Overall Student Performance report. This report does essentially the same thing as the Overall Skill Performance report except it does it for one student at a time. It is a good way to look at how one student is doing on multiple skills over the course of all of the assessments taken in a class. This report is also not available until 24 hours after the last assessment has been taken.

The final report is called the Student Performance report. This report gives a detailed report for a single student over any assessments the teacher chooses. It offers the opportunity to see how any student has performed on all skills tested in this class.

All of the Skills Iowa reports are easy to generate and use. Each of them has its own purpose and each of them displays a different view of the data generated by the assessments. This is the Analyze part of our Assess, Analyze, Act process. If one uses the data generated in these assessments to inform the instruction in this class, student achievement can be raised substantially.

Take a look at the reports over your assessments. They are great diagnostic tools. If you need help, contact your project leader.

Benchmark Assessments

This year Skills Iowa has made an addition to the very successful math benchmarks we introduced last year. We now have monthly reading assessments available at each grade level. These assessments are automatically assigned to your students, but they can only access them by entering a seven digit test code that will be provided to each of our schools by your project leader.

The schedule for math benchmarks is:
Test 1: August 31 - October 2
Test 2: January 4 - February 5
Test 3: April 26 - May 28

The reading assessments will be available on the first Monday of each month and will end on the last Friday of each month.

These assessments will do several things. They will generate data that will help your school in making program decisions and should help drive the instruction. They will also make test creation problems nonexistent since the tests are already created and assigned. Finally, they will allow your school to compare your results with other Skills Iowa schools who have taken the assessments.





To assign the assessment, your students will only have to enter the seven digit test code in the appropriate window on their Assessment Center page.

We encourage the use of these assessments to aid your school and your students.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

A Report on Pop Up Blockers

One of the biggest cause of problems with Skills Iowa's two programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor is the use of pop up blockers. If you are having a problem with a page not appearing, check to see if your pop up blocker is on. It may be that you have more than one pop up blocker in effect on your computer. Start by going to the Tools menu on a windows machine or the Safari menu on a Mac. If the pop up is on, turn it off, or tell it to allow pop ups for this web site. Next, you might have a pop up blocker in a Google tool bar. Turn this off as well. If neither of these solutions works, try holding down on the control key while you execute the unsuccessful comand again.

It is possible that the school has a pop up blocker on that can only be administered by your tech person. If this is the case, you must ask him/her to allow pop ups for ac.corek12.com and www.myskillstutor.com.

The short word on pop ups is that they will create problems for Skills Iowa's programs.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

An important change in Skills Iowa

We at Skills Iowa are very excited about a new feature in our programs this year. It may take you by surprise, but you'll love it. When you create a class in Assessment Center, a class bearing the same name is automatically created in Skills Tutor. It's a great time saver in training, but it also saves confusion as the year progresses. Any time you add a new class or a new student to a class in Assessment Center, the changes are made in Skills Tutor.

We think you'll like the change! One thing you need to keep in mind however is that even if you can get an unsupported character accepted in Assessment Center, the same character might keep your class from being created in Skills Tutor. Don't use characters such as: @, #, / and & and you should be just fine. Keep it simple!

Enjoy the upcoming year.