Wednesday, March 31, 2010

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.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

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.