Happy Holidays From All of us at Skills Iowa

Another year has passed, and your break has finally arrived. Take the time to enjoy and reflect on all of the positive things you've done this year for students. It may take many years to realize how many lives you will touch, and how many students will make life choices based on what you teach them and how you interact with them. Education is an amazing career with the opportunity to change the world.

We at Skills Iowa thank you for letting us be a part of what you do.

Enjoy your break, and if you can, make a Skills Tutor assignment for your students before you go!

Happy Holidays

ELA Benchmark Assessment Results

Each month, we send you the results of all of the ELA benchmark assessment results from participating schools. We do this to help you compare your school's performance on these assessments to other Skills Iowa schools.

The best way to make this comparison is to run an Assessment Results report from the teacher account to compare your class to school accounts or to run the same report from the administrator account to compare your school to other schools. Finding your school in the report may be difficult since your report was run at a different time than the report we send you. The results could show assessments that have been entered after we ran our report.

The data you see is limited to what percent of each grade at each participating school fell into each of the four performance levels. This information should allow you to see if other schools are making progress that you are not making or vice versa. All data is useful, including disappointing data. If your school is falling short, you need to know this as soon as possible, and that is one of the purposes of this report.

What this report will not show you is where your students are excelling and where they are falling short of goals. Your own Assessment Results will show this, and this data is very important.

If you need help using these reports, please contact your project leader.

Which assessments appear automatically?

As you know, Skills Iowa has created and assigned ELA (reading comprehension) and Math benchmark assessments for your classes. These assessments appear automatically at predetermined intervals. The ELA assessments appear on the first Monday of each month and end on the last Friday of each month. The Math assessments appear three times a year, and the next one will appear on January 4th. The level of the assessment you get for your class is determined by the choices you made when you created your class. Our request is that you give these assessments at the grade level that your student is in, not for the achievement level which you have determined to be correct for your student. This is the same procedure that your school uses for standardized testing. IF you are finding that you have assessments showing up for a different grade level each month, then it is likely that you entered multiple grade levels in your class creation process.

If you want to edit this to remove the incorrect grade designation, log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in question. Next, click on Class Details on the left side and then click on the Edit button at the top of the resulting page. Scroll down on this page to the course list and make sure that you have only ELA and Math designations for the correct grade level. If you have additional levels, you should remove them. The easiest way to make this correct is to click on the "Click Here" link just above the Course List designations. This will align your class to the grade level you have chosen earlier in the creation process. IF you have a multi-level class, you should not make this change.

Making this change will make unwanted assessments disappear from your assessment list.

Two good ideas

There is always a concern about how to use the data from the we gather when we use Assessment Center assessments. If you are giving Reading assessments (ELA) here are two good ideas.

A teacher in Pocahontas Area Elementary has her students take her assessments on paper to control the climate of the room and also to allow her to make the assessment more authentic. She has her students go to the passage and write the number of the question next to the part of the passage that contains the answer. In this way, she slows down the students, and encourages them to go back to the passage and take some time to make sure they understand the question and are confident that they have answered it correctly.

A second teacher in the same school has his students go over the printed assessments after they have taken the assessment. He has the students work in pairs to discuss each missed question and together they have to find the answer in the text. This works on student communication and helps students explain their thinking to another student.

Both of these techniques are great ways to have your students increase their understanding of the passages they read. Both of these ideas are simple to implement, and easy for students to understand.

Good job!

It was a tough week!

The week of the December 09 Blizzard was a tough week for school. I imagine that kids were getting a little bored by the end of Thursday. Hopefully, some of your kids took advantage of the assignments you made in Skills Tutor. It's a good way for them to keep fresh on the skills you are, or rather would have been covering in class this week. There is no reason that those with computers at home can't do work that will be engaging and will keep them on track during a snow day.

Now would be a good time to sit down and plan what you would like your kids to do over the upcoming break. You can do review assignments in Reading Comprehension, Math, and Language Arts. You could also do introductory lessons in the units that you are going to be starting after break. For those of you who are looking at semester tests when you get back from break or before break, this is a good time to create those and let the kids know they are there. Kids get tired of television after a day or two, and lots of families will be getting new computers for Christmas gifts. What a great opportunity.

Remember to take your username and password home with you. If you get a snow day, you can quickly go online and create a "Snow Day Assignment" for your kids to work on. Let them know that just because they aren't in your room that their education doesn't have to come to a halt for that day.

If you need any help with Skills Tutor, log in to www.skillsiowa.org and click on the Documents link. The Quick Reference guide for both programs is listed there for you to download.

Enjoy the season!