Data Teams

Are you already in a PLC? Are you using data to make educational decisions? If so, be sure you include the information you can gain from the Assessment Center reports in your data set.

In Assessment Center, the Detailed Performance on Standards report gives a look at how students have done over a selected set of assessments. Aggregating the tests gives a larger sample of questions that cover the same skill, and therefore, increases the validity of the information. You could also select only early assessments in one report and in a second report select only recent assessments, and then in effect have a comparison from two different periods of time.

Also in Assessment Center, you will find the Assessment Comparison Report which will allow you to compare two or more assessments and give a look at growth over time.

Be sure you take a look at the set of reports that are available, and if you would like to have a project leader come to your building, be sure to contact your project leader to set up a visit.

New Student Creation

If you have a new student move in to your school, it is easy to create an account for this student.

Once you are logged in to Assessment Center, click on one of your classes. (You can add the new student to any class you choose, so if you have more than one student to add, don't worry about which class you choose.) Next, click on Class Details and then click Add/Remove Student. On the resulting page, you will enter the data about the student. The only parts that are not intuitive are the unique ID and the password.

For the unique ID, we use the ten digit state ID. If you don't have this, you can create an id of your own by choosing a few letters from the student's first name, last name, your school and a number, ie: John Smith from Washington Elementary could become johsmiwael2011. There is a pretty good chance that no one else in the country would use this exact set of letters and numbers.

For the password, we use the first initial and the first five letters of the last name. Again, John Smith would be jsmith. If the last name is fewer than five letters, then we use the first initial and the entire last name.

At the bottom of the page, you can choose the class you want to add the student to, or you can choose to create a student that is not going to be in any of your classes by choosing the option to add the student to your school. In either case, the student is automatically created in Skills Tutor as well.

If you get a notification that the student cannot be created now, please contact your project leader who can remedy that problem for you.

If you have any questions, please contact your project leader.

Invalid Test Cut Off Values

If you are using Safari to create your Assessment Center tests, you may proceed for a long time with things working correctly, but eventually, you will encounter a last page with no values in one set of the boxes on the cut scores. You will get a dialogue saying that these scores are invalid, which of course, they are.

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to correct this and save your assessment. If you use another browser, such as Firefox, you will not experience this error.