How are you using the data?

How are you using the data from your Assessment Center assessments? We've had a lot of benchmark assessments and teacher created assessments given this fall, and we're excited about that. The question is what are you doing with the data?

If you haven't already gone to reports to see how your students have done, try to find the time to check that out. For math, it's mostly a matter of seeing how your students did on the benchmark tests on concepts that you expected them to know when they came to you or to know by the time they took the assessment. Probably the easiest way to see how your students performed on a single assessment such as the benchmark assessments is to look at the Assessment Results report. While the scores at the top of the report showing each student's performance on the assessment are interesting and can tell you something about how seriously a student took the test, they shouldn't be used as a real sample of how well that student is doing in your class. After all, there is typically only one question on the skill, and they may perform better on a larger sampling. The assessment is more useful to see how your entire class did, and this information is found in the last part of the report where you find the multicolored bars. The red portion of the bar shows low performance and the blue part reflects high performance. Clicking on the bar will give you the names of the students who struggled and succeeded with this skill. More importantly however, is the idea that this is a skill which should be taught to the entire class or one that can be done in targeted instruction that will help remediate a group in your class. In math you may want to look at the performance in a given skill and make a decision to give an assessment of your own with more questions over the same skill. Just take note of the number/letter code in front of the skill and then create a new assessment that covers that exact same skill.

In ELA (reading comprehension) you may want to design a lesson plan around the passage that was used in the assessment. Print the passage out and distribute the passage section to your class. If your students struggled on inference, for instance, you could ask them an inferential question that they can answer in small groups. Have them find evidence in the passage that will support their answer. Have them discuss their ideas in small groups, and then have them write a short paragraph that answers the question. If they struggled on main idea, have them underline the most important sentence in every paragraph and then in 20 words or less, explain the main idea of the passage. Cause and effect cause your kids problems? Design a lesson which asks them to find the reason something happened and then what effect that action had; next, ask them to explain it in an outline, a short paragraph or a mind map.

The assessments you are giving your kids are just the starting points for increasing student achievement. It is only through using the data to drive your instruction that achievement increases.

If you want to get more ideas like these, sign up for the Skills Iowa Regional meetings. You can find the sign up information on the opening page of our website: www.skillsiowa.org

Individual Student Reports

In both Assessment Center and Skills Tutor, you can choose to have a report for an entire class or for an individual student. These are useful for conferencing and to help monitor progress.

In Assessment Center, the last two reports on the teacher's Reports page are called Overall Student Performance and Student Performance. By name, they seem to be almost identical, but they offer some different options that may be of use for you.

Overall Student Performance offers the teacher to ability to view ALL of the results from all of the assessments taken by subject and type. For instance, you might choose ELA as the subject and Administrator Created to see all of the reading assessments that had been created by Skills Iowa and/or your administrator. You could choose to see the same information over assessments you had created by choosing "Teacher Created". These options are available in ELA, Language Arts and Math. This report will give you the results of ALL of the assessments of the subject and type selected. It will aggregate the performance data on these areas.

Student Performance will also aggregate data, but it will do it over any assessments you choose. You can put the assessments you create and the administrator assessments together in one report. You can also include Math, ELA and Language Arts in the same report. Another option is to only select the assessments that cover the time period you are interested in.

These two reports give you the ability to get a good idea of how a single student is performing on Assessment Center assessments.

In Skills Tutor, you can get a report on any number of individuals by choosing Student Detail from the reports page. You select the student(s) you want to know about, the subjects you are interested in, and the time period you want the information to cover, and you will create a report.

Using the reports in Skills Iowa's programs will help you help your students to reach their potential.

Having trouble accessing the Assessment Center website?

If you have recently experienced difficulty trying to sign in to Skills Iowa using Assessment Center, you may be using the old address, asc.princetonreview.com. Assessment Center initiated a new address in late summer, ac.corek12.com. The old address was redirecting the user to the new site until the first of October. From now on, the old address will not work. You can only access Skills Iowa through the new address.

ac.corek12.com

Benchmark Round One

Our first round of benchmark assessments has concluded, and they have been a resounding success. Thousands of benchmarks were given, and this will give all of the participating schools great comparison data.

The two biggest problems that were encountered involved turning off the pop-up blockers and making sure that classes were created properly. The pop-up problem is pretty simple, and the class creation problem requires that ELA or Math at the appropriate grade level must be in the course list on your class details. We found our way through these problems. A couple of other problems that arose involved students not being enrolled in the class and teachers not realizing that a test code must be entered to take the assessment.

The real reason for the benchmark assessments is to get a look at how your school, building and classroom are doing in some of the essential skills which are tested in the Iowa Core Curriculum. The data raises a lot of questions, and that is a valuable part of the educational discussions that must take place in schools. This one small piece of data may help you and your school make decisions not only applying to your classroom but to district goals as well. We hope the classroom teachers will validate individual classroom results with further formative assessments. Larger samplings of questions that zero in on single skills will help teachers make even further instructional decisions.

The next round of reading benchmarks starts on October 5th, and the next math benchmark assessment will begin on January 4th.

If you have further questions about the benchmark assessments, you can look at the benchmark information at our website, www.skillsiowa.org or you can contact your project leader.