Assess, Analyze, Act

Most of our schools have either been with Skills Iowa for more than a year, and have a pretty good idea of how our programs operate. Those that have joined this year, have, by in large, been fast learners and have made impressive implementations of the programs. The next step is to make sure you are using the data to impact student achievement by allowing the data you gather from Assessment Center and other sources to drive the instructions in your classroom.

Formative assessment has the ability to increase student achievement by a factor of .7. In other words, a student who may have gained a whole year of progress in a school year could gain 1.7 years of progress. How? By knowing what your students already know, and what they need to study, lessons can be planned that concentrate on deficiencies and which do not focus on what students already know. Knowing who in your class has mastered a skill allows the teacher to offer intensive study for those who are still in need of help, practice for those who are almost there, and enrichment activities for those students who have already mastered the skill.

Skills Iowa offers many tools to help you gather this information. We offer all of our member schools monthly reading benchmark assessments at grades 3-11 as well as three math benchmark assessments during the year covering grades 3-11. The reading benchmark assessments can be used formatively to help you make instructional plans. The math benchmarks can help you monitor progress on the skills that are covered in these assessments. All of our tests are aligned with the Iowa Core's essential skills and concepts. The reports included in Assessment Center will assist you in deciding if a skill has been mastered or if it needs to be retaught to the entire class or to portions of the class. For those who need more practice, we offer the lessons in Skills Tutor as well as many activities which can be found in Assessment Center's Skill Resources.

Of course, making and using the assessments you create in Assessment Center will allow you to gather even more data that follows your curriculum. Using pretests and midway testing allows the teacher to make an informed decision about when it's time to move on to the next concept in the plan.

Skills Iowa's project leaders and trainers are ready to help you use our programs to make educational decisions. We are ready and able to come to your school to work with your teachers to create assessments, read reports and plan lessons. If you need help, please contact your project leader.

Need to see how a student is doing with assignments?

If you have given a series of assessments that you have students doing over a period of time, and you want to see how a given student is doing on that task, there is an easy way to do this.

Click on the Class Details linkand find the student in quesiton. Click on that student's name. The page that appears has information about this student including the names of the classes he/she is enrolled in. Just to the right of the class name is a link named Assessments. If you click on this link, you will get a list of all of the assessments assigned to this student and the student's score if he/she has completed it and a dash if it has not been taken.

This is not a fast process for the entire class, but if you are looking at information for a few students, it's a good place to find the information.

Student Progress Report

Assessment Center has a new feature this year called Skills Progress Summary. It allows a student to see how he/she has done on all tested skills in your class. To access it, the student needs to log in to Assessment Center. Once there, the student needs to choose your class from the list of classes in the upper right hand corner of the home page under the My Classes heading. This is a drop down menu, and all classes will be listed.

Once the student chooses your class, a new tab will appear in their list of tabs. This tab is called Progress Reports. When the student rolls over the tab, three options will appear, the third option is the Skills Progress Summary. If the student clicks on it, all of the tested skills will be listed with the students performance level for that skill. If the student clicks on the name or description of the skill, he/she will be taken to a list of resources that can help improve the understanding of that skill. There will also be a link for the student to take a practice quiz over that skill. This quiz will be a five question quiz that will report back to the student, not the teacher.

An important part of formative assessment is making the student a partner in his/her education decisions. Seeing where they have found success, and where they still have more work to do makes them an active partner in their education.

Give it a try!

Overall Skills Performance Report

If you have been a user of the Overall Skills Performance Report, you might be wondering why you can't find it in the list of Assessment Center reports. This report has been retired. We suggest that instead, you try the Detailed Performance on Standards report.

The advantage the Detailed Performance on Standards report holds is that it allows you to select the assessments that will be on the report. As the year progresses, you can leave off the assessments you took earlier in the year, and you can get a truer look at the current performance level of your students.

To use this report, log in and select a class. Next, click on the reports tab and scroll down to the Detailed Performance on Standards report. Once you select this report, you will be asked to select the subject, grade, and alignment. We suggest you use the Iowa Essential Concepts and Skills, the Iowa Core alignment. After these selections, you will click next and make another round of choices. You will choose which assessments you want on the report and which achievement levels. We suggest you choose all four of the achievement standards. Once you have done this, click next again and you will be taken to the report.

The first thing you may want to do is click the "View Larger" link in the upper right hand corner of the window. The percent given for each standard will be the average score of all students who took the assessment(s) chosen. The left column is all of the students in the school for the subject/grade selection, and the column to the right shows your class.

The letter/number designations on the left show standard designation used by Assessment Center. You can search with this code in Skill Resources to find activities that will help you, the student and the parents work on this standard.

If you have any questions about using this report, please contact your project leader.

Benchmarks

The first math benchmark test and the September reading benchmark tests are now active. They will expire on October 1st, so if you have not already made your plans to administer them, it's time to do it.

A couple of things that you should keep in mind:

1. Students must turn off the pop up blockers for the test code to allow access to the test.

2. Your classes must be aligned to ELA for the reading benchmark test to be accessible and to the math alignment to make the math benchmark show up. You can check this by clicking on the class details tab. Your alignments will appear at the top of this page; if you need to change them, you can click on edit and change your alignments.

3. Students do not have to finish a benchmark in one sitting, but they will have to reenter the test code to resume testing.

4. If a student is unable to access the test, you should try entering the code for him/her. If that doesn't work, you should try on a different computer that you know another student has been able to use successfully.

5. The test codes are sent to your building principal monthly, but they are always available on our website by using the "Benchmarks" button. You can also find this information by clicking on the "Assessments" tab in Assessment Center. Look under the Test Code column in the assessment listing.

The benchmark tests are a good initial measurement of student achievement. The earlier you administer them, the more they measure the student's incoming knowledge. We hope you find these useful tools to help you make educational decisions.

Have a question?

There's a lot of good stuff at Skills Iowa's website, www.skillsiowa.org. One new feature is in the FAQ's area. If you scroll to the bottom of that page, you will find a place to submit your own question. Your question will be sent to all of our staff who will then have the ability to respond to your problem.

We hope you will use the FAQs and that you will submit your questions. Of course, we also encourage you to contact your project leader with your questions. You can find their contact information in the Skills Iowa Staff section.

Part of a team?

If you are part of a collaborative team, Skills Iowa's programs are a good fit for you. Both programs offer you the ability to work collaboratively.

Assessment Center assessments can be shared with all of your staff, and can be made searchable so all teachers teaching the same subjects could administer the same assessment. Another feature of Assessment Center is the ability to add one or more teachers to your class. This way a cooperating teacher has the same access to data that the lead teacher has. The reports, the heart of Assessment Center, are another way to collaborate. If you have all given the same or a similar assessment, taking the performance data to a collaborative meeting will help provide the focus that your team needs to plan the next step in your teaching plan.

Skills Tutor has new features this year that allow the sharing of assignments not only between your sections, but also within your school. If your team wants to insure that everyone has assigned the exact same lessons, this is an easy way to make that happen. To set up this sharing, check out the Advanced Assignment Options button in Skills Tutor.

If you are a single section school, another way to make collaboration work is to compare your results on the benchmark assessments with those of the other Skills Iowa schools who have taken the same assessment. A teacher in a neighboring school who is finding success could be a great resource, and the communication between schools is a way that both districts can benefit.

Skills Iowa data is a useful way for you to highlight those areas where your students are finding success and those areas where they struggle. Planning the strategy to address the information the data shows you can help you increase student achievement.

Something to consider...

If you have assessments in your account that you created last year, you may want to edit them to give you more options.

Over the summer, our bank of questions was realigned to more closely match the Iowa Essential Concepts and Skills In Math and Literacy. While what you created and used last year was aligned to the Iowa Core, there may now be skills you couldn't find last year or more questions on those skills this year.

To edit an assessment, log in to the class you want to work in. Once you are in, click on the Assessments tab. Select the assessment you want to edit and then click the edit button at the upper part of the page. You will now be able to go through the assessment and check for additional available items. If you created the assessment using the Reading Curriculum standard, or the Iowa Grade Level Indicators in Math or Reading you should find more items available this year. You may also find completely new skills in the math alignment that were not there last year.

Give it a look, and if you need help, contact your project leader.

Welcome Back!

Some of you are in year-round school, and some of you are just thinking about getting back to school for the 2010-11 school year. Either way, it's the beginning of the Skills Iowa school year.

You will find that you probably have the same username and password that you had last year, and some of you will find that you still have Assessment Center assessments in your account that you created last year and assignments you made in Skills Tutor. We encourage you to revisit these and make changes that are appropriate for the new year. Assessment Center has made more extensive alignment to the Iowa Core Curriculum, and there may be items that you want to add to your old assessment through the edit tab.

You will notice that both of our programs have a new look. It may seem completely different when you sign in, but you should quickly recognize your way around. The functions are more or less the same, but we have some new reports and new looks to old reports that we feel are real steps forward.

Your school will be receiving a packet of information soon that will be used in training if you are training early or which can be used right now if your Fall Refresher will come a few weeks after the beginning of school. In some cases, your school's new imports have already been made, in other cases, we are waiting for the data to be returned to us, and we will get your students in as soon as we can. If you find your students are already present in the correct grade for the new school year, there is no reason to wait for us; go right ahead and get started.

We're excited about the changes in our programs, and we are looking forward to sharing them with you, but most of all, we're excited to help you use the data from Assessment Center to help your students raise their achievement. Formative assessment works, and you can certainly use the tests you create in Assessment Center formatively and address the areas of concern with Skills Tutor as well as with many other strategies.

Welcome back! We're looking forward to seeing you.

Ending the Year and Summer Plans

As you end your school year, you may want to give some thought to the data you've collected. An easy for those of you who teach reading and who have given the reading benchmarks is to run a Compare Assessments report of each of the three genre of ELA (reading comprehension) assessments that you gave this year. We have found that teachers are not used to getting such data, and hopefully, the results will give you a pat on the back as you see the improvement in your students' scores through the school year. If you don't see this improvement, it is a great time to reflect on why the data doesn't show what you hoped for.

If there are individual students whose data should be retained for individual instructional needs next year, you should run the Student Performance report to select the assessments you want to report on.

The Skills Tutor data can also be useful, but be sure you know what the reports tell you. Since students can take these lessons over and over, you may want to run a Student Detail report to get the full picture on each student.

You may want to make some very large assignments in Skills Tutor for your students to challenge them to do more and to review what they have done. Let your kids know that these lessons will be available well into the summer.

Data is an objective way to evaluate not only a student's progress, but also a program's success. If we use it as a stepping stone to improvement, there is nothing to fear in data.

If you need help, contact your project leader. The data will be cleared out some time this summer, so please gather whatever you want to save before July 1st.

The Status of Assessments You Have Created

If you have assessments in your account that you have created, those tests will still be there next year as long as they have student data associated with them. If you have tests that you created that you have not used, those assessments will be deleted midsummer. IF you want those assessments to be retained, you must go in and enter answers for at least one student and grade that assessment.

Trouble Shooting

Today we had a problem arise at a school in assigning assessments. I had the same problem when I tried to trouble shoot for them. What finally solved the problem was switching browsers. This shouldn't happen, of course, but in the course of companies changing browsers and systems, problems can arise. We can always try to solve the problems by first switching browsers. If it doesn't work on Safari or Explorer, does it work on Firefox? If it does work on that switch, we know that somehow things have changed with one of those browsers. If you have the opportunity to switch platforms, say from Windows to a Mac, does that change things? Does your problem exist on all of your computers using the same system, or does it work on one computer and not another? If you have tried what you can try on your own, you may have to contact your project leader for help. He/she may not have the answer, but he/she can direct you to someone who might be able to help you.

With all of the differences in how each school's networks can be set up, it is hard for anyone to know exactly what to do each time something comes up. Let us know, and we'll do our best to help you. The answer is frequently as simple as turning off your pop up blocker.

Year End Reports

There's a lot of the school year remaining, but it's still time to start thinking about next year. While you still have the data from this school year in your accounts, take a look at your assessments and run some of the reports that can tell you where your students have made progress and where they continue to struggle.

If you have been using Skills Iowa's benchmark assessments, you might want to run comparison reports using the Compare Assessments report. This report will allow you to compare selected assessments to see if your students have shown growth. With time left this year, there is still time to reteach some of the big concepts that have eluded your students.

The Overall Skills Performance report will show you the strong and weak spots for all of the assessments your students have taken in selected subjects over a selected period of time. Keep in mind that if some of your assessments were pretests, that those assessments will be included in this data.

Finally, if you want to zero in on individual students, you can run the Student Performance report, the last report in your list. This will allow you to select those assessments that you want to see in the same report and will allow you to select only those assessments you think should show mastery and give you the opportunity to not select the pretest assessments.

Assessment Center's reports are a valuable way for you to use data to drive your instruction. They are also a great way for you to make plans for the upcoming year.

The Quest for Quality

In their book, Multiple Measures, Stephen Chappuis, Jan Chappuis and Rich Stiggins put forth five keys to quality in assessments in the chapter The Quest for Quality.

1. Clear Purpose-Know why you are conducting the assessment; what do you want to learn from the assessment.

2. Clear Learning Targets-Know what you want to measure; do you want to see if students already have mastery of a skill or are you trying to make a decision of whether to do more instruction on a topic.

3. Sound Assessment Design-Make sure the type of assessment you are giving will measure what you want to know. Not every type of assessment results in the same type of information.

4. Effective Communication of Results-Is the assessor able to get the results of the assessment in time to make the instructional changes necessary, and can he/she share those results with students.

5. Student Involvement in the Assessment Process-Students need to see the results of their assessments as soon as possible and they need to be able to learn from their results with immediate reinforcement.

Skills Iowa's Assessment Center can help you with many of these aspects of your assessment program. All assessments are not created equal. If you cannot break down the results to determine which parts of the test caused your students problems and to find out where they found success, your assessment results in only a grade. Assessment Center's suite of reports allow you to know how a class or a student has done on a single assessment on each skill tested. You can also see how they have done over a series of assessments. Skills Iowa assessments give you the data to make instructional decisions.

Skills Iowa Implementation Meetings

If your school has not already had an implementation meeting to plan the use of Skills Iowa in the upcoming school year, you soon will. You have some great ideas that your fellow teachers and administrators should know. This is a great time to discuss how you have used Skills Iowa as well as to ask questions that you have about the programs we use in Skills Iowa.

If you have questions that can't be answered in your school, contact your project leader by clicking here. We at Skills Iowa are ready to help you find answers to your questions.

Your ideas are too good not to share. If you want to share them with those outside your building, please comment here on the Skills Iowa Blog. You will have to create an account before you can post, but you may already have an account.

We're looking forward to hearing from you, and your fellow teachers should hear from you as well.

Thanks for all you do.

Math Benchmark Assessment

You took the math benchmark assessments this year, but have you used the Compare Assessments report to see where there has been growth? This is a great report that shows you how your students have grown on the Essential Concepts and Skills. You can see the score of the entire assessment, the progress for individual classes as well as individual students and individual skills. This is the reason to take these assessments. If you need any help using this report, please contact your project leader.

Flash Player

There is a new version of Flash Player out, Version 10. You should not yet install this on your computers because it will cause problems with using Skills Tutor.

If you have already installed it, you will need to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Please consult your tech staff for help in doing this.

Don't wait

If you are wondering about a part of Skills Iowa that you haven't used, and are planning on using it next year, don't wait. Get started with it this year with a group of kids who you already know. This will help you get familiar with it for next year.

If you are using the benchmark assessments, but have not created and used your own assessments as well, try to create and use one over the concepts you are teaching right now. Your kids already know how to do their part, so why not reach out of your comfort zone just a little bit and start gathering more information about your students' achievement levels.

Some of our teachers use only one or other of the programs. While we are always happy to find usage of our programs, using one or the other of them in isolation will not lead to the same results as using both programs in conjunction. If you have not used Skills Tutor, and feel you need a little review, let your project leader know. Your project leader is going to be in your building soon for implementation meetings for the 2010-11 school year, and it would be easy to add a visit with you to the day.

Assess, Analyze, Act. This is our plan, and with the use of both of our programs, you can complete the process.

Using the Compare Assessments Report

By now, you've had the opportunity to take the first two of three Skills Iowa Math Benchmark Assessments and two each of each of the two types of Skills Iowa Reading Benchmark Assessments. It's a great time to use the Compare Assessments report to see if you are showing growth in the tested skills.

The first math assessment tested the students' incoming math performance; the second assessment shows us how students have progressed during this school year. If your students have not shown growth on skills that you have taught this year, it's not too late to hit those skills again. There are many Skill Resource activities and Skills Tutor activities that can help, but you the teacher are the most important resource available to your students. It's easy not to recognize where growth has happened because students test over skills when the skills are fresh in their minds. The benchmark assessments don't follow the timing of your instruction, and in that sense are a good real world test of the retention of these skills.

The reading comprehension assessments will not provide such a true skill for skill comparison in the Compare Assessments report, but they will still give you an idea of growth. If nothing else, they will put two assessments in front of you to make your own comparison. It's a great opportunity to see where reteaching needs to be done.

If you need help using the Compare Assessments Report, contact your project leader.

Snow Day Plans

This winter may be the worst that most of us can remember. Lots of lesson plans have had to be rewritten and rewritten again. The real question is what continuity problems are being created for our students, and what can we do about it? There is no one great solution, but hopefully, this entry might give you something to think about and to come up with even better ideas.

The first and easiest solution is to create a series of "No School Day Assignments". Let your kids know that they will be expected to work on these when there is no school. Include lessons in Skills Tutor that cover the concepts that you are covering in class. It might be best NOT to use the pretests. The pretests might not have your kids do the lessons that you are covering that week. Instead, you might choose the lessons that directly correspond with your week's planned concepts and skills. Take a survey in your class to find out who has a computer with internet access at home. This will give you an idea of how many of your students you can expect to complete the lessons.

You might also want to make up a "Snow Day Packet" of activities and work sheets that you can print out from Assessment Center's Skills Resources and Skills Tutor's worksheets. If you include lessons that you know always trip up your students, they can do extra work on those concepts and skills while they are at home. You might want to send these home in a sealed envelope with something like, "Open in the event of a snow day only!" on the front. Try to include a writing activity in this packet as well as just worksheets. The Parent Activities from Skill Resources would be a good idea to help those supervising the students on those days.

The benchmark assessments could also be given on these days. If you know that the forecast for the next day is for bad weather, you could send home the test code with the students. For those of you with websites, you could let the students know that the test codes will be posted on your website. If you have an email list for your students, you could email them instructions of what to do and include the test code in this email. If you know that some of your students do not have internet at home, you might want to print up the tests for them at the beginning of the winter months and send them home with them when it appears that the weather will make school cancellation the following day a possibility. Remember to enter these scores later for these students.

If you are having late starts, you are really losing instructional time. This would be a good opportunity to duplicate the benchmark assessments and send them home as homework. Having the students enter their scores individually when they next have computer time will take very little time, or you can enter them yourself very easily.

If you have already given the benchmark for the month, you might want to prepare an activity to help them with the most critical need reflected in the reports on that assessment. You might want to have them find the correct answers in the passage, or you might create an activity to help them make discoveries about main idea, inference, or any other skill tested in that passage.

These ideas are just starting points, but they may help you make a decision about using Skills Iowa to keep the momentum going in your classes in this incredible winter.

Remember, winter can't last forever, but it surely can seem like it will. Keep your spirits up and try to make the most of every day!

Using Skills Iowa's Reports

If you are giving Assessment Center assessments, you should be checking reports.

It's in the reports that you will find the areas in which your students are succeeding and in which they are struggling. Of course, we want to celebrate the successes, and we want to address the areas that cause our students difficulties.

In his address at the Iowa Association of School Boards, Mike Schmoker pointed out an example of a teacher in Flagstaff, AZ who raised student achievement in his building by having his students do three simple things over and over again: read, discuss and write.

We suggest that you print off the reading comprehension assessments you are giving. After consulting the reports to find the critical needs from this assessment, pass the assessment out to your students and use it again. One way to use it is to have your kids read the passage again and then search the passage for the correct answers. They can do this in teams or individually.

Another activity you might try is to break your class down into teams of twos and have them read the passage with a task in mind. For instance, if you see that your students are having difficulty picking out the main idea, you might have your students take the passage apart paragraph by paragraph writing one sentence that contains the idea that is expressed by that paragraph. If they are having trouble making inferences they could choose all of the events that lead up to a conclusion and all of the events that followed the conclusion and writing a paragraph that explains why things ended the way they did. You get the idea. There is no one way to use the passages in conjunction with the reports, but the key is that you use the reports to point you to a way to read, discuss and write.

Your project leader will be happy to come to your school to help you work with the reports, but the key is to look at them and make decisions on what help your students need. Just knowing that they are struggling with inference or main idea will not help your students. Just assessing your students on these concepts will not help either. Checking reports and planning your instruction around them will have an effect on achievement.