Skills Iowa

Data Teams

2011-03-09T09:59:00.002-06:00

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

2011-02-08T11:48:00.003-06:00

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

2011-02-08T11:43:00.003-06:00

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.

Assess, Analyze, Act

2010-12-31T07:07:00.002-06:00

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?

2010-12-14T10:07:00.002-06:00

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

2010-10-22T20:32:00.002-05:00

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

2010-10-22T13:28:00.007-05:00

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

2010-09-15T18:44:00.002-05:00

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?

2010-09-15T18:40:00.003-05:00

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?

2010-09-06T10:50:00.002-05:00

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...

2010-08-27T14:20:00.004-05:00

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!

2010-08-05T12:35:00.006-05:00

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

2010-05-24T10:27:00.003-05:00

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

2010-05-14T06:58:00.003-05:00

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

2010-04-23T16:00:00.003-05:00

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

2010-04-19T10:07:00.002-05:00

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

2010-03-31T09:57:00.008-05:00

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

2010-03-17T10:40:00.002-05:00

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

2010-02-26T11:38:00.002-06:00

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

2010-02-18T13:39:00.003-06:00

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

2010-02-17T07:58:00.002-06:00

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

2010-02-09T10:30:00.002-06:00

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

2010-01-26T10:14:00.006-06:00

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

2010-01-24T11:47:00.003-06:00

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.

Happy Holidays From All of us at Skills Iowa

2009-12-22T09:38:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-20T10:47:00.002-06:00

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?

2009-12-20T10:37:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-14T20:53:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-12-11T07:08:00.002-06:00

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!

Creating a New Student Account

2009-11-25T12:21:00.005-06:00

If you have gotten a new student in your class, someone has to create a new Skills Iowa account for that student. This is a situation that can be handled in your school in a number of ways. This is something that you can easily do, but something that you do not want another teacher to duplicate. To be safe, the first thing to do is to open the class the student will be enrolled in. Next, click on Class Details and from the menus under that, click Add/Remove Student. You will have two windows on the screen that appears. The one on the left will have students who are in your school at the designated grade level, but not in your class. The window on the right will have those students already enrolled in your class. To be safe, you need to look through the list of names in the window on the left to see if someone else has already created the new account. If the student is not there, no one has created the account at that grade level. It is possible that someone has created the account at the wrong grade level however, so to be sure of this, go to the menu above the windows that says Students in Grade ? and switch your choice to Students in the School. This should be everyone not in your class. If the student is not in this list, you can create the new account.

Above the windows is a link that says: Click here to create a new student account. Click on the click here link. Click on the Next link on the resulting page. On the next page, enter the student's first name, last name, grade, unique id (10 digit state id, or another unique id you create), and password (first initial and first five letters of last name or complete last name if it is shorter than five letters.) You can also click on the box in front of the name of your class to enroll this student in your class. Click on Next and on the next page, review the spellings of the student's name. If all is correct, click on Next and on the following page, you can copy the student's new usernamen and password before you click on Done.

The student is now in your class, but has not been given any of the Assessment Center assessments or the Skills Tutor assignments. To see how to give the student this work, click here.

Locating a Skill in Assessment Center

2009-11-14T10:07:00.004-06:00

Sometimes it's not so easy to find the skill you want to assess in Assessment Center's Iowa Core Curriculum alignment, Essential Skills and Concepts. Of course, you can select and open all of the options and look through them, but there is another way you could proceed.

Skill Resources contains a search function that is intended to help you find an additional resource to address a skill with additional activities. This search can also help you find where in the assessment alignment this skill is located. For example, let's say you wanted to make an assessment for your 6th grade math class covering ratios. Click on Skill Resources. Select Math and 6th. In the search criteria, enter ratios and click on search. You will get a list of the topics which contain ratios. Look at the number/letter combination which precedes the skill; this is the designation for the skill you want to assess. For instance, in the example you can see that the topic falls under 6.N. When you create an assessment, look for the section labeled 6.N (Numbers and Operations) and open this section by clicking on the plus sign to the left of it. From the resulting list, put a check mark in front of 6.N.4, the next part of the code. Click Next to proceed. On the next page, click on the plus sign in front of 6.N.4 and then look for 6.N.4.e. Open this link and proceed by selecting the number of questions you want. Remember to open the very first section to remove the unwanted question that was selected by the program in the first section. Continue creating your assessment as you would normally.

This is a pretty quick way to see if the skill is covered in Assessment Center. Give it a try!

Pausing a Skills Tutor Lesson

2009-11-04T20:06:00.010-06:00

Pausing an assessment in Assessment Center is easy; there's a pause test button at the bottom of the testing page. Pausing a lesson in Skills Tutor is less obvious, but just as easy. All of the Skills Tutor lessons except Algebra, Science 1 and 2, Information Skills and Workforce Readiness will pause automatically when a student closes them before finishing. If at least one question in the activity has been answered, the next time the student opens that lesson, an animation of a book flipping pages will appear and take the student to the point where he or she left off. Actually, the student has no other option for that lesson except to start it at that point.

Of course, all Skills Tutor lessons except the pretests can be taken as many times as a student chooses. If a student can't finish a lesson in the time available, he/she doesn't have to start it from the beginning.

If you have more questions about using Skills Tutor, contact your project leader.

How are you using the data?

2009-10-28T17:52:00.007-05:00

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

2009-10-15T12:52:00.002-05:00

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?

2009-10-07T12:57:00.004-05:00

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

2009-10-04T08:56:00.005-05:00

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.

How are things going?

2009-09-27T14:06:00.002-05:00

We'd like to know. If you are having problems, let us know. If you do have a problem, be sure you give us all of the information you can. Give us the username/password of the student who is having problems. If it's you with a problem, send your username/password. We'll be able to help you better. If it's with a specific test or class, give us the name of the assessment or class. We'll get back to you sooner if you give us the full picture.

If you are finding success, and things work beautifully, we'd love to hear that kind of information too. We'd like to opportunity to share your success stories and great ideas with other Skills Iowa teachers.

Let us know!

October 2nd ends the 1st benchmark window.

2009-09-20T10:18:00.005-05:00

If you have not yet administered the first math and reading benchmark assessments, your time is running short. Both of these initial benchmarks end at midnight on October 2nd.

You will not have another opportunity to give another math benchmark assessment until January 4th, but you will get a monthly reading assessment. If you have to choose which one you will not do if you run short on time, taking the math assessment is probably more critical.

You will want to allow enough time to complete the math assessment. It has 30 questions, so it will take somewhere around an entire class period or more to take.

Of course, you will be able to create your own math, language arts and reading assessments to give at any time. The benefit of the benchmark assessments to you and your students is the comparison to other Skills Iowa schools who have taken these assessments.

Remember to turn off your pop-up blockers for these assessments to load.

Is your benchmark assessment working correctly?

2009-09-06T09:53:00.003-05:00

If your students are loading the correct number for a benchmark assessment and the assessment is not coming up, one of a few things might be happening.

Number 1: There is a pop-up blocker in place on your computer. There might be two if you have a Google toolbar on that computer. You must turn off all pop-up blockers.

Number 2: Your school may be blocking our site from pop-ups even though things worked last year. We have a new address (ac.corek12.com). You may need to have your technology person change the settings to allow this new address.

Number 3: The student not getting in to the assessment may not be in a class. If the student has been recently created and not yet enrolled in an Assessment Center class, that student will not be considered a valid recipient for that assessment.

Number 4: The student may have already completed the assessment. Once the assessment has been taken, the student cannot retake it.

Number 5: The time period of availability for this assessment may not have arrived, or it may have already passed.

If you are having problems that do not fit one of these situations, please contact your project leader for help.

The Benchmark Tests are Live!

2009-09-01T22:00:00.002-05:00

If you haven't yet noticed, you have at least one assessment in your class that you did not create or assign. This is the benchmark test in math or reading (ELA). Your students will need to use the test code protection which has been provided to your principal and possibly a lead teacher in your building. You can also see the test code listed with the assessment when you view the assessment in your list of assessments. Check out the information about the benchmarks on: www.skillsiowa.org

One thing you must be certain to do for the benchmark to work is to have the pop-up blockers on student computers turned off. With a test code, these tests become pop-ups and they will be blocked if the pop-up blocker is on. If you need help with this, contact your school's technology leader or contact your project leader.

The benchmark data is a great way to see how your students are doing.

Tips From the Blog

2009-08-25T20:08:00.002-05:00

If you frequent the Skills Iowa Blog, you see some articles that address immediate problems and concerns, and there are others that address situations that come up year after year. It's these articles that we have reformatted as PDF files and placed them on the Skills Iowa Web Page for you to download and use.

Check it out.

Formative Assessment

2009-08-23T11:23:00.003-05:00

This blog has been going for a while now, and some of the earlier posts are sort of buried. From time to time, we'll bring one or more of them up for your viewing.

Click here for a post about formative assessment.

Assessment Center Reports

2009-08-23T10:04:00.007-05:00

Assessment Center has six reports available to teachers. Each of them is useful in a different way, and each raises and answers different questions about the same data.

The first report listed is the Assessment Results report. This report gives the scores on a single assessment, breaks the scores down into the four performance groups, gives the ability to drill down to see a single student's assessment, and shows the performance data on each tested skill. This report gives a quick look at what we just did, and allows us to make decisions quickly about the tested skills.

The next report in the list is a Compare Assessments report. This report will allow you to show a comparison of how many students performed in a given performance group or groups in selected assessments as well as showing the entire distribution of total scores on a single assessment. For example, if you were interested in showing how many students had scored in the top two proficiency groupings on two assessments, you would merely click the Meets Standards and Exceeds Standards buttons above the list of assessments on this report page. Next, you would click the assessments you want to compare. Your report will show the newest assessment on the left. You may want to run this report more than once using different choices of performance groups to show the entire picture.

The third report is called the Question Details report. This report provides an item analysis of the assessment. With this, you get the ability to see not only which skill caused your students problems, but also which question or questions caused students problems. Any incorrect answer displays the incorrect choice. The correct answers are shown by a + sign. At the bottom of the columns is a series of buttons with the letter "I" displayed. These icons will allow the teacher to see which skill was tested by this question. To see the skill, just let your cursor hover over the appropriate icon.

The fourth report is called the Overall Skill Performance report. This report allows the teacher to see how a student has scored on all tests given and taken in a given subject area. The selection of ELA, Language Arts or Math must be made when building this report. The teacher must also choose from a list of Assessment Types. If the teacher is evaluating assessments that he/she has created, he/she should choose Teacher Created. If one is looking at the performance on the benchmark assessments, you would choose Administrator Created. The resulting report shows a multicolored performance bar graph. Clicking on each of these bars will show the grouping of students on each of the tested skills in all of the assessments used so far in this class. This aggregate report gives a look at how students have done on a series of assessments. This report is not available immediately after taking the assessment. It will be available within 24 hours.

The fifth report in the list is called Overall Student Performance report. This report does essentially the same thing as the Overall Skill Performance report except it does it for one student at a time. It is a good way to look at how one student is doing on multiple skills over the course of all of the assessments taken in a class. This report is also not available until 24 hours after the last assessment has been taken.

The final report is called the Student Performance report. This report gives a detailed report for a single student over any assessments the teacher chooses. It offers the opportunity to see how any student has performed on all skills tested in this class.

All of the Skills Iowa reports are easy to generate and use. Each of them has its own purpose and each of them displays a different view of the data generated by the assessments. This is the Analyze part of our Assess, Analyze, Act process. If one uses the data generated in these assessments to inform the instruction in this class, student achievement can be raised substantially.

Take a look at the reports over your assessments. They are great diagnostic tools. If you need help, contact your project leader.

Benchmark Assessments

2009-08-23T09:45:00.003-05:00

This year Skills Iowa has made an addition to the very successful math benchmarks we introduced last year. We now have monthly reading assessments available at each grade level. These assessments are automatically assigned to your students, but they can only access them by entering a seven digit test code that will be provided to each of our schools by your project leader.

The schedule for math benchmarks is:

Test 1: August 31 - October 2

Test 2: January 4 - February 5

Test 3: April 26 - May 28

The reading assessments will be available on the first Monday of each month and will end on the last Friday of each month.

These assessments will do several things. They will generate data that will help your school in making program decisions and should help drive the instruction. They will also make test creation problems nonexistent since the tests are already created and assigned. Finally, they will allow your school to compare your results with other Skills Iowa schools who have taken the assessments.

To assign the assessment, your students will only have to enter the seven digit test code in the appropriate window on their Assessment Center page.

We encourage the use of these assessments to aid your school and your students.

A Report on Pop Up Blockers

2009-08-16T12:17:00.003-05:00

One of the biggest cause of problems with Skills Iowa's two programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor is the use of pop up blockers. If you are having a problem with a page not appearing, check to see if your pop up blocker is on. It may be that you have more than one pop up blocker in effect on your computer. Start by going to the Tools menu on a windows machine or the Safari menu on a Mac. If the pop up is on, turn it off, or tell it to allow pop ups for this web site. Next, you might have a pop up blocker in a Google tool bar. Turn this off as well. If neither of these solutions works, try holding down on the control key while you execute the unsuccessful comand again.

It is possible that the school has a pop up blocker on that can only be administered by your tech person. If this is the case, you must ask him/her to allow pop ups for ac.corek12.com and www.myskillstutor.com.

The short word on pop ups is that they will create problems for Skills Iowa's programs.

An important change in Skills Iowa

2009-08-12T21:11:00.002-05:00

We at Skills Iowa are very excited about a new feature in our programs this year. It may take you by surprise, but you'll love it. When you create a class in Assessment Center, a class bearing the same name is automatically created in Skills Tutor. It's a great time saver in training, but it also saves confusion as the year progresses. Any time you add a new class or a new student to a class in Assessment Center, the changes are made in Skills Tutor.

We think you'll like the change! One thing you need to keep in mind however is that even if you can get an unsupported character accepted in Assessment Center, the same character might keep your class from being created in Skills Tutor. Don't use characters such as: @, #, / and & and you should be just fine. Keep it simple!

Enjoy the upcoming year.

Assessment Center has a new URL

2009-07-08T14:26:00.002-05:00

Assessment Center has a new URL, or web address. To access Assessment Center, and in turn Skills Tutor, you can now log in at: ac.corek12.com. Please note, that just as with the old Assessment Center address, there is no www in front of this address. The web address you are used to using for Assessment Center will continue to work for a few months, but it will stop working during the school year. If your tech person is working on bookmarking the program during the summer, this would be a good opportunity to make the change and avoid confusion later in the school year.

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

It's Summer

2009-06-21T07:43:00.003-05:00

We're all still available by email or phone, but the blog will be pretty inactive until late July or early August. If you have questions, please contact your project leader; we'll all be glad to take your call or answer your email. You can always search the blog to see if your question has been dealt with. Look at the top left for the search box.

Have a great summer.

The Skills Iowa Folks

Summer School

2009-05-25T07:01:00.002-05:00

If you are having summer school this year and will be using Skills Iowa's programs, you need to let your project leader know your ending date. We will be cleaning up the sites over the summer, and we don't want to do that for your school while you are still using the programs for your summer school program.

Have a great summer whether it includes summer school or not!

The End is Near...

2009-05-18T17:44:00.002-05:00

The end of the school year that is. Before you go home for the summer, it might be a good idea for you to print out some of the reports that have helped you determine what direction your teaching for the current year needed to go. While the next group that comes to you will be made up of different kids with different needs, it will be interesting to make comparisons on student performance and the success of strategies you have used this year.

Another good reason for saving the reports is to answer the questions of the teacher who will have your students next year. Data drives the instruction, and knowing how kids ended up this year will be a great starting point for next year's teacher.

We at Skills Iowa thank you for all you have done this year to increase student achievement. You have one of the most important professions in our country. Thanks for all you do!

7th Grade Math Benchmark

2009-05-13T22:09:00.004-05:00

We have discovered that there was an error on the final 7th grade math benchmark assessment.

Question 17 had an incorrect answer identified as the correct answer. This has been corrected. If you have already administered the assessment, you can go into the answer sheet for each student and simply click on the button to score the assessment. You will then get the correct results. If you need assistance with this, contact your project leader.

If you administered the test telling all students to choose "C", those results will be skewed. C will now not be the correct answer. In this case, you could go in and mark every answer sheet with the correct answer, or you could simply ignore the third test's results on that skill.

We apologize for the error. The Princeton Review corrected the mistake as soon as it was brought to their attention.

Adobe Flash Player Version

2009-05-11T10:22:00.004-05:00

Skills Iowa makes use of Adobe's Flash Player. Some of the lessons in Skills Tutor will load with older versions of the programs, but the ones created most recently like Language Arts, will not. It isn't easily evident which version of the program you have installed on your computer, so it can take a bit of time to go to Adobe's website and run through the install routine on your computer. Fortunately, Adobe does offer a tool to determine which version of the program you have installed on your computer. Just go to www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome . Once there, you will click on the About button to see which version of the Flash program you have installed. There is also a Shockwave Player section, but Skills Iowa doesn't use this technology.

If you need any help with this, please contact your project leader.

Spring Math Benchmark

2009-05-06T15:30:00.007-05:00

The third math benchmark is ready for you to administer to your kids. To find it, you must log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in which you want to administer the test. Once you are there, click on the Assessments link. By default, the new page will have a search window available for you. Enter the words Skills Iowa and click the search button (note: hitting return or enter will not do the same thing). Your search should result in an assessment named: Skills Iowa Grade X Math Test 3. If the assessment does not show up for you, you may have to check the settings in "Class Details". If you do not have the math level for that class set in the last set of settings on that page, the assessment will not be available. You can add the appropriate math level to the settings, and then save your settings and search again.

Once you have located the assessment, put a check mark in front of it; click on assign, and then choose the options you want on the next page. After clicking Next on that page, you will be given a list of students who have been assigned the assessment. You must click on Save at the bottom of the page, or the assignment will not be given.

This assessment is a good end of year check up and can be compared to the beginning benchmark assessment and the mid year assessment if you administered them. Let us know if you need help.

Looking for a way to work on "Main Idea"?

2009-04-29T19:49:00.003-05:00

Something sort of odd happened to me today. During a demonstration of the program, I was asked whether a science lesson in Skills Tutor would read the text on the page. I said, "Let's click on it and see." Not all Skills Tutor pages work in exactly the same way. Some read passages sentence by sentence, some read the entire page, and some read a summary of what is on the page. Science is one that reads a summary of the page.

While it was reading the summary or main ideas of the page, it occurred to me that this could be a great way to work on identifying main idea or summarizing.

Here's the suggestion. Assign a science lesson that you think would be interesting to your kids. We used the lesson on the cell in Science I. Either have them all bring the page up, or, if you have the technology, bring it up on a projector or smart board. Have the kids read the contents of the page; a process which will take about three minutes. Then, have your students write a quick summary of what the main or most important ideas on this page were. Next, click on the text on the page and it will read its summary out loud. It's a quick way for the student to do some self evaluation to see if they were correct. There should be about three pages at the beginning of any science lesson which will operate in this way, and when you get to the point where your students are having to answer science questions, you can either choose to have them answer, or you could exit that activity and go to another.

Keep in mind that the Science lessons are leveled for high school, but are frequently used in middle school and occasionally lower. The vocabulary may be too difficult for lower grades. I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you try this

Do you have questions?

2009-04-20T11:18:00.003-05:00

Sometimes we don't ask questions because we don't want to bother someone who might have the answer. We at Skills Iowa want to assure you that you are never a bother to us; we are always happy to answer your questions. Just contact your project leader and he or she will get right back to you.

Another solution is to ask someone at your school who is using Skills Iowa's programs to help improve student achievement. Usually, those folks are happy to help.

A third option might be to ask the questions right here on this blog through the comments section. It's easy, and you can bet you aren't the only person with the question you might want to ask, so just ask!

Is your report not loading?

2009-04-14T07:35:00.004-05:00

If you are getting a white screen that doesn't go away when you are trying to download a report, the problem is most likely an activated pop up blocker.

You may have already turned off the pop up blocker, but in a Windows computer, you may have a Google toolbar which also contains a pop up blocker. Check for that too. When you turn off the pop up blockers, try your report again, and it should load.

Reports, Reports, Reports

2009-04-04T11:13:00.002-05:00

Skills Iowa usage really comes down to Assess, Analyze, Act. If you are giving assessments and assigning lessons in Skills Tutor, you really need to be checking the reports. This article gives a review of what the reports are and what they do.

Let your project leader or your building leader know if you have questions.

Have you helped someone else at your school?

2009-03-29T08:04:00.002-05:00

Skills Iowa's project leaders are always willing to help you with any questions you may have about the use of our programs, but sometimes there's nothing like someone sitting right down at your side and answering your questions RIGHT NOW. Since the project leaders can't always be right there right now, someone at your school who uses the programs might be the person to go to. The people using the programs may know the most about them.

Don't know who that might be? Your building administrator can log in and check on the number of logins and assessments given in Assessment Center, and the number of student minutes logged in Skills Tutor. It makes sense that the people with the the highest numbers are the people you might start with.

If your building administrator needs help running those reports, he or she should contact your project leader; they're always willing to help.

If you are that person in your building, letting others know that you might be able to help, may insure that your building keeps a viable level of usage that helps raise student achievement. You can make a difference!

Connecting

2009-03-22T11:12:00.004-05:00

A few years ago, the novel Feed by M.T. Anderson presented a world where virtually everyone was connected to television and computers via a brain implant. People had these mechanisms implanted when they were born. The result was a world of people who could barely speak because they could already hear what others around them were thinking. They didn't need to read or write, and as a result, most couldn't. The world around them was bleak and deteriorating.

It all seemed interesting but impossible. Well, not so fast. At a recent meeting of TED, this presentation showed a mechanism that allows the beginnings of some of the same technologies. It presents a virtual sixth sense.

There is a link at the site that allows the downloading of this clip to your desktop or your iTunes account. It would make a great discussion/writing starter. Check it out.

It's amazing technology. Who knows, maybe this is the communicator of the future.

The "3 Rs"

2009-03-22T10:19:00.006-05:00

In the March 22nd Des Moines Register an article by David Elbert entitled "Vibrant future predicted for Iowa" speaks about ideas for the future of Iowa. Eighteen prominent Iowans came together to brainstorm about Iowa's future, and they came up with many ideas ranging from light rail to a tongue in cheek notion by Fred Grandy that Iowa declare war on South Dakota.

One of the participants, Anita native Victoria Bernhardt, spoke about how education has changed. The 3 Rs are no longer reading, writing and arithmetic but rather rigor, relevance and relationships. In other words, challenging, meaningful work that is supported at home, in the community and at school.

Skills Iowa is right there to help you do just that in your classes. The Assess, Analyze, Act strategy of Skills Iowa will help you make sure that your work is rigorous and relevant. Students who take formative assessments in Assessment Center can be directed to further work that is exactly what they need to master the skills needed for further learning. The reports in Assessment Center not only let you see how your school, and class are doing, but also give you specific information on how each student is performing on the necessary building blocks of education. With that knowledge, students can be directed to high quality resources in Skills Tutor. These skills are offered at performance levels from introductory to advanced so your students can work on rigorous lessons that are geared to their unique needs.

As for Relationships, Skills Iowa allows parents to sit down with students and work side by side with their student. Parents have the opportunity to be a part of their child's education. Skills Iowa lessons can be done at school, home or at the public library. Skills Iowa allows the teacher and school to see the larger picture of student performance for a classroom, building and district.

Skills Iowa is a great way for you to meet this view of modern education. No matter which way you view the "3 Rs", Skills Iowa is there to help you raise student achievement.

Skills Tutor Changes

2009-03-20T10:18:00.005-05:00

There's a new feature in Skills Tutor that allows you some real choices. A new assignment option has been added to the assignment creation page. It states that the pretest can assign the posttest. By default, this box is checked, as are all of the option boxes.

What this means is that you can choose to have the posttest show up immediately after a student takes the pretest, or, if you choose, you can uncheck this option and give the posttest at a later time. This could be valuable if you want to do some additional teaching before your students take the posttest.

Any assignments that you have made before this option was added can be modified to allow you to make this change. Just log in and select your class. Choose the "Class Properties" and then select "Modify Assignment". Choose the assignment you wish to modify and under the options, uncheck the box which states that the pretest can assign the posttest. Then you can make another assignment later that is just for the posttest. You must remember that some of your students may have already taken the posttest, and when you reassign it, it may show up as already completed. This doesn't need to be a problem since students can take the posttest as many times as they choose.

Since this is a brand new feature, there may be other implications. Give it a try if this is a control which you have been wanting.

Spring Meetings

2009-03-11T16:56:00.003-05:00

Each participating Skills Iowa school will be having an implementation meeting to discuss the use of the Skills Iowa programs for the 2009-2010 school year.

If you have any concerns that you feel should be part of the discussion for your building, please share them with your building principal. This way we can be sure to have your topic brought up for discussion.

We thank you for your continuing participation is Skills Iowa and thank you for all you do for kids.

Renewal Notice

2009-03-02T11:35:00.003-06:00

If you have noticed the renewal notice on the Skills Tutor home page, you may have questions about whether your school needs to renew your Skills Tutor account. The answer is no. All Skills Iowa schools receive our programs at no cost to the schools. Your account does not need to be renewed. You can keep right on using the program and not worry about this notice.

Spring Break

2009-02-26T08:46:00.004-06:00

You deserve a break, and so do your kids, but sometimes, kids find themselves with nothing to do over a break. Their parents are still at work, their friends have gone out of town or there is just nothing to do. You could suggest that they log on to their Skills Iowa account and go to Skills Tutor and do some skills practice. Kids frequently find the activities engaging and they sometimes don't even realize that they are doing school work. Of course, you will have to put work on Skills Tutor for them to do before this will work. At this point in the year, it wouldn't be a bad strategy to assign everything in your subject area at their grade level. You might also want to assign the work at the grade level above their current grade so those students who have exhausted the work already assigned can take on a new challenge.

You can also suggest that your students look at the practice quizzes and skills resource lessons in Assessment Center. Self assessment is a valuable piece of any student's education. They might not really know whether they have mastered a topic or not, and with Skills Iowa, they can have the chance to find out and do something about it.

Enjoy your spring break when it comes. You deserve it!

Know anyone who works with geography?

2009-02-20T09:05:00.004-06:00

Here's a site that has a quick, interesting game. It's not violent in any way, and I don't see how it could offend anyone. It shows the user where cities are located. It doesn't cover the entire world, but it does a good job of covering Europe and the Middle East, probably the airports where Lufthansa flies since they own the site. Click here to give it a try!

Don't wait

2009-02-16T08:25:00.005-06:00

If you have not done a lot in either Skills Iowa program this year, get started now; don't wait until next year. The gaps in your students' understanding can still be identified, and there is a lot of school year remaining to address these gaps. Use Assessment Center to create and administer the formative assessments that will allow you to discover where your students are struggling, and then use Skills Tutor to address those gaps and to help you help your students get a firm grasp on the basic skills that they need to understand and work with complex concepts.

Another good reason is that using Skills Iowa this year will allow you to get a better understanding of how you might use it next year. During training sessions, the time to decide how you might use the programs in your curriculum is limited. If you get a better understanding of the programs now, you can tailor the use of them next year when you set things up.

Get started now so you can use Skills Iowa to help you make that difference in student understanding this year and next. Click here for a brief review of the functions of each program.

If you have misplaced the quick reference guides for the programs that you received at your early year training, click here to find downloads of these guides. If you need further assistance to get going, click here to contact your project leader for help.

Compare Assessments Report and Math Benchmark Assessments

2009-02-12T10:10:00.006-06:00

If you have given both of the math benchmark assessments, you should take a look at the Compare Assessments report in Assessment Center. To find this report, select the class you want to evaluate. Next, click on the Reports link on the left side of the page. When that page loads, click on the Compare Assessments link in the middle of the page.

When creating this report, you must select the two assessments to be compared. For instance, you might check Skills Iowa Grade 5 Math Test 1 and Skills Iowa Grade 5 Math Test 2. The other choice you must make is which performance group or groups you want to see on this report. The initial response is to decide that you want to see all groups. However, checking all four groups will provide you with a report that is of little use. It will show you that all of your students fell within the selected parameters. A better choice is to think of the question that you want to answer; for instance, how many students were in the Below Standards group at the beginning of the year and how many are in that same group now. Of course, you hope that the group is smaller the second time. More importantly, you can see skill by skill where the most and least progress has been made. Another choice might be which students are in the Meets Standards and Above Standards groups. For this choice, you would isolate those students who are doing well in your class. In this case, we would hope that the second assessment numbers would be larger. As you can see, you would want to run several reports to get a complete view of how your students are doing.

If you need assistance using the Compare Assessments report, contact your project leader.

Resetting a Single Assessment Center Assessment

2009-02-02T13:24:00.007-06:00

If you have a student or two who really need to retake an assessment because something went wrong when they took the assessment, this is easy to do.

Just log in to Assessment Center, click on the name of the class in question and then click on Assessments. Click on the name of the assessment you need to use and on the resulting page, scroll down to the list of student names. Put a check mark in front of the name of the student or students in question, and then scroll up to the blue command button which says, "Reset Selected Sheets", and click on that button.

The assessment will be reset for the selected student or students only, and the assessment will be reassigned for that student or those students.

Please note that there is a Reset button further up on the page. Don't confuse these two buttons. The Reset button will delete the results for all of your class and will unassign the assessment. If you are in doubt about which button to use, please contact your project leader for assistance.

Creating New Students

2009-02-02T11:27:00.003-06:00

When a new student moves in to your district, it is best that someone in the office of your building creates an account for this student. Frequently, the principal or someone else designated to do this job will do this. If more than one person creates a new account for the student, it is possible that the student will have more than one identity, and that creates problems for everyone.

The instructions for creating new accounts are found on our website: www.skillsiowa.org. Click on the Documents link to find the instructions.

If you have any questions about creating new student accounts, please contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor and Math Facts

2009-02-02T11:21:00.002-06:00

When you log in to Skills Tutor, you will see an ad from the Skills Tutor people for a free upgrade to Math Facts. You might think that this means that you can get the Math Facts program added to your account for free. In fact, the upgrade is simply an upgrade for schools around the nation that are using and paying for Math Facts. Math Facts is not a part of the Skills Iowa project, and therefore, your school is not eligible for the upgrade or for the use of the Math Facts module for that matter.

Sorry for the confusion.

Math Benchmark Assessment

2009-01-29T06:51:00.002-06:00

Time is running out to assign the Math Benchmark Assessment. This assessment must be assigned before February 1st. If your kids can't take it before that time, it will still be available if you get it assigned before February 1st.

Take a look further down this page to find the instructions on how to assign this assessment. If you have any problems, contact your project leader for assistance.

Have you checked the reports lately?

2009-01-22T20:38:00.003-06:00

Both of Skills Iowa's programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor have full suites of reports that allow teachers and administrators to know where students have strengths and weaknesses in their academic progress. Using the programs without using the reports gives your students an opportunity to discover where they have success, but if you don't know that as well, the process is incomplete. Remember, it's Assess, Analyze, Act. The reports are the Analyze part of Skills Iowa.

Search this blog for Reports, and you will find several articles about how to use the reports that are included in each program. You can also contact your project leader if you need more help.

Bad Weather Plans

2009-01-13T16:10:00.000-06:00

Recently, we have been experiencing some inclement weather that has prevented school from proceeding as usual. At these times, you might want to encourage your kids to work on Skills Iowa.

Students can always work independently on the Practice Quizzes and Skills Resources in Assessment Center, or, they can work on Skills Tutor lessons if you have assigned lessons to them. Remind them that these resources are always available. If you have questions about using the Practice Quizzes or the Skill Resources, contact your project leader.

Short Cut to a Student Performance Report

2009-01-11T13:01:00.000-06:00

If you are looking for a fast way to get a look at how an individual student is doing on one or more assessments, here is a fast way to do it.

Log in to Assessment Center. Click on the class you want to use. On the main page for that class, there is a list on the right hand side. Click on the name of the student you would like to get information on. Next, there will be a list of assessments you have given that student. Check the assessments you would like to have shown in the report, and then click on the "Show Report" button below the list of assessments.

What will result is a break down of the student's performance on the skills tested.

It's a quick way to take a look at how one of your kids is doing.

Skills Iowa and ELL Students

2009-01-11T11:17:00.000-06:00

Can Skills Iowa help with ELL students?

The short answer is: maybe. If you have high school level Spanish speaking students who struggle with English, some of the high school level lessons will speak portions of the lessons in Spanish. To do this, you must log in to Skills Tutor directly rather than using the link from Assessment Center. To do this, go to: www.myskillstutor.com or click the link in Assessment Center for Skills Tutor, and once there, click the "Log Out" command on the left.

In either case, you will now need a site ID to log in to your school's site. If you don't have this, your project leader can provide it for you. Just send an email request for that information if you need it. You will also need to click the box below the log-in info which states: Play audio in Spanish (when it is available).

If you have elementary level Spanish speaking students who are just learning English, you might find the Beginning Language Arts and Beginning Math lessons helpful. These lessons can be accessed just as you would any other other Skills Tutor lesson, but before clicking on the start button, the student should click on the link which states: Esuche el audio en Español. The lesson then will have the audio in Spanish and the text in English.

Please let your project leader know if you have any questions about using Skills Tutor with your ELL students.

Time for some review...

2009-01-11T10:25:00.000-06:00

It's easy to assume that the people who have been trained have an understanding of the Skills Iowa programs, but the training happens pretty fast, and it happens at a time of the year that you have a lot on your mind. So, with that in mind, let's review the purposes of each of our programs.

Assessment Center

Assessment Center is a program which is used to create multiple choice assessments which can be taken online or offline. When taken online, these assessments are graded automatically and the results are broken down by performance in each of the skills. The reports can show you how a class is doing on a given skill or set of skills or you can look at individual students to see where there are gaps in understanding. The testing can be done at any grade level from 3rd through 12th in Reading (ELA), Language Arts or Math. When this program is used for formative assessment, student achievement can be raised dramatically when coupled with judicial usage of the reports and an eye toward remediation. Multiple assessments can be made over the same subjects.

Skills Tutor

Skills Tutor contains pretests, interactive tutorial lessons, quizzes, posttests and problem solving lessons in reading comprehension, math, language arts, science, information skills, workforce readiness skills and vocabulary. There is only one lesson per skill at a given grade level. The lessons are divided into general performance levels. Level LL is for a lower level third grade reader and is only used in Reading Comprehension. The other levels are A: 3rd/4th grade, B: 5th/6th grade, C: 7th/8th grade and lessons such as Reading with no level behind them which are created for high school level students. Additionally, at the elementary level, Beginning Language Arts and Beginning Math are offered for struggling students.

There is a full set of reports that allow teachers and administrators to monitor student performance from an entire school view to the view of an individual student.

Skills Iowa

Skills Iowa is the name of the project. Each school is assigned to a project leader who does the training and support for that school. Typically, each school has a refresher training or an initial training at the beginning of the school year, and then follow up training sessions are offered to schools as they need them. The project leaders are also available to answer questions about the use of the programs and to help the schools and their teachers in utilizing the programs.

Skills Iowa suggests using the Assess, Analyze, Act model. Teachers can Assess in Assessment Center, Analyze there with the reports and Act using Skills Tutor.

Questions

If you have questions, please contact your project leader or Susie Olesen, the project director.

January Math Benchmark Tests are Available

2009-01-08T16:27:00.002-06:00

It's January, and as promised, the second math benchmark is ready for you to administer to your kids. To find it, you must log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in which you want to administer the test. Once you are there, click on the Assessments link. By default, the new page will have a search window available for you. Enter the words Skills Iowa and click the search button (note: hitting return or enter will not do the same thing). Your search should result in an assessment named: Skills Iowa Grade X Math Test 2. If the assessment does not show up for you, you may have to check the settings in "Class Details". If you do not have the math level for that class set in the last set of settings on that page, the assessment will not be available. You can add it to the settings, and then save your settings and search again.

This assessment is a good mid year check up and can be compared to the beginning benchmark assessment if you administered it. You can also use this one to compare to the assessment that will be offered in May.

Let us know if you need help.

Do you have any questions?

2009-01-08T16:25:00.001-06:00

This blog has tried to answer a lot of the questions that come up when our project leaders visit schools, answer phone calls and read emails. If you have questions that haven't been answered, and you think the answers would be good for everyone, why not hit the comment button and ask away. We'll try to come up with the right answer to each and every question.

Let us know.

Welcome back!

2009-01-02T09:44:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year!

Welcome back from a well deserved break. Hopefully, you are rested up and ready for school.

If you are pondering how to get things started, you may want to think of some review assessments in Assessment Center that will get kids thinking about skills that have already been covered in the year. It only takes a few minutes for you to put this assessment together and only a few minutes to look at reports that can give you a great deal of information about which skills your students have mastered, and which skills still need some work.

You can also set up activities in Skills Tutor to address those skills that individual students need to review. Just click the desired activities, assign them and let the kids know they are there.

If you have forgotten how to get these activities going, check out the Skills Iowa website at www.skillsiowa.org. There are quick reference guides there that will take you through the process for both programs. If you need more help, contact your project leader. We'll be glad to help.

Happy Holidays From All of us at Skills Iowa

2008-12-19T14:46:00.001-06:00

We would like to take a moment to wish you all the best of the season. All of us with Skills Iowa appreciate all that you do to make a difference for kids, and we know that high achievement for every student is much more than a slogan. We know that you are the biggest influence outside the home that your students are likely to have this year. We are honored to be one of the strategies you use.

Enjoy your time away from school, and know that when you come back from break, we will be available to help you help your kids.

Happy Holidays from the Skills Iowa Staff!

Winter Break Activities

2008-12-15T08:29:00.000-06:00

Since kids will have lots of time on their hands, winter break is a great time to have your students do some extra review in Skills Tutor. In all subject categories except Reading Comprehension LL, A, B and C and Reading Vocabulary A, B and C the pretests are prescriptive. In other words, if you give the pretest, the program will determine where your students need extra work and will assign lessons to address the gaps in mastery. If your kids are going to have semester tests when they get back from break, this could be a great way for them to sharpen their skills.

You might also want to point out to them that they can take practice quizzes in Assessment Center. These quizzes can give them an idea of how they are doing in their quest to master these skills.

Don't forget Skills Iowa over the holidays. Your students can learn a lot on their break.

Is your semester ending soon?

2008-12-08T08:09:00.000-06:00

Since almost everyone is going to be ending the semester on one side of the other of Winter Break, it's a great time to use Skills Iowa to determine which of your benchmarks your students have already mastered, and which they need more work on.

Giving a review assessment in Assessment Center which covers the skills that will be covered on your semester test can give you a good idea about which skills have been mastered and which skills your entire class has not retained. It will also give you a pretty good idea about which individuals in your class might be lacking in the mastery of some skills.

Once you know, you can send your students to Skills Tutor to hone those skills, work with the students in small groups or individually, or reteach the skill to the entire class.

Skills Iowa is a great way to identify and address skills that your students may not have mastered and which ones they have. Knowing which is which gives you the opportunity to make a difference in your students' achievement.

How are your kids doing?

2008-11-24T12:53:00.001-06:00

If you're not sure, there are ways to find out in Skills Iowa's programs.

In Assessment Center, click on the Reports link on the left side of the page. This will take you to a set of reports that you can use for this class. Two reports stand out above the rest for checking on a class: Assessment Results and Overall Skill Performance.

Assessment Results will give you information about how the class has done on an assessment. It will break the class into four performance groups and it will also show you how your students did on each skill assessed in the assessment.

Overall Skill Performance allows the aggregation of assessments and shows you how students did on a series of assessments. If you have assessed a reading skill over the course of four assessments, this report will put all of those assessments together in one report.

In Skills Tutor, the reports link is available on the very first page. By choosing the class and the desired report, you can get a good idea how a class is doing as well as how individuals are doing. Two reports that get a lot of use are the Gradebook and the Student Detail reports.

Gradebook is under Assignment Reports. This will show how each student has done on one selected assignment. It looks just like any gradebook except all of the math is done for you.

The other Skills Tutor report that tells a lot about a single student is the Student Detail report. Choosing all of the students, the correct modules, and the time period will show you how often a student has done the lessons, how much time he/she has spent, what time of day they were done, as well as the score and percentage. This is an excellent report to use to conference with your students.

If you have not used Assessment Center, there is no time like the present to get started. An assessment that covers the essential outcomes that you have taught in the first half of the year will show you where you and your students have been successful and where there are still gaps. The whole concept of formative assessment is made quite simple with Assessment Center.

If you have any questions about how to proceed with the reports or the use of the programs, please contact your project leader.

What version of Flash Player are you using?

2008-11-15T07:05:00.000-06:00

Wondering what version of Flash Player you have installed on your computer? You must have at least version 9 installed to be able to use the newest modules on Skills Tutor. This includes all of the Language Arts modules. You can check your version of Adobe's Flash Player by going to www.macromedia.com.software/flash/about/

Look for the little boxed are on the right side of the window. It will tell you what version of Flash Player you have installed.

A word about classroom climate...

2008-11-08T09:40:00.000-06:00

Taking a group of students to the computer lab can frequently be confused by the students as going to a fun place, a place where we can behave differently than we do in the classroom. For the teacher, it can become a place where we now not only have to deal with 20 plus students, but also with 20 plus computers. There are lots of questions, and lots of distractions, and lots of opportunities for the classroom climate to become noisier and more distracting than usual. It's natural, but if this situation persists, the results of Skills Iowa's assessments and lessons may not truly reflect a student's ability.

Students need to learn that the computer lab is just an extension of the classroom. Behaviors that are not tolerated in the classroom, such as talking to your neighbor, should not be tolerated in the computer lab. Teachers need to realize that when they are helping students, that they can be creating distractions too. Answering student questions needs to be as quiet as possible, and as infrequent as possible. Students need to be encouraged to be independent when in a large group.

To make quiet and independence possible, we need to do our prep work. Students should be shown how an assessment works before they are expected to take one. LCD projectors and smart boards are great tools for this. If you have access to this technology, creating a sample assessment and going over it with the class will prepare students for taking assessments on their own. If you do not have access to these technologies, you might just want to have students gather around a computer while you show them the procedures that will be utilized, or you might have each student at a computer while you guide them through, step by step an assessment or a Skills Tutor activity. Once they have completed this assessment or lesson, they can proceed to take an alternative assessment on their own.

If you have students who cannot or will not behave at the computers, you may want to consider making the use of the computer a priveledge that students earn. You can print out a student version of the assessment and have those students who are too distracted take their assessment that way. Once they see the other students at the computer, they may want to behave differently.

The bottom line is that the computer lab is still your classroom. The same attention to learning climate that is maintained in the regular classroom is just as important in the computer lab.

Adding Students to an Existing Assignment

2008-11-04T20:20:00.002-06:00

This question came up twice in one week, so it must be worth touching upon.

If you get a new student in a class, you must add that student not only to the class, but also to the assessments in Assessment Center that you want him/her to take. To do this, you go to the Assessments link on the left side of your Assessment Center class page. A list of assessments that you have created will show on the lower part of the page. These assessments are not necessarily assigned to students, but the problem occurs on assessments that are already assigned. To assign the assessment to a new student, start by putting a checkmark in front of the assessment. Next, click the Assign button above the list of assessments. The new student should be in the left window; click on his/her name and click on Add. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Next and on the next page, scroll to the bottom and click Save. The student will now be assigned this assessment.

You should not remove any of the students who already have been assigned the assessment from the list of assignees. They will not be assigned the assessment another time; only the new student will receive a new assignment. If you do remove the student from the assignment on a teacher created assessment, you will lose that student's test results, clearly an undesired effect.

To add the student to Skills Tutor lessons, click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side of the screen. Next, click on Classes. Then, click on Class Properties. At this page, click on Give Assignments and you can check the empty boxes to the right of this student's name to give him/her the these assignments.

Adding a second teacher to a class

2008-10-30T20:10:00.000-05:00

If you and another teacher both work with the same group of kids for the same subject, you can add a second teacher to your Assessment Center class. You cannot, however, do the same thing in Skills Tutor. This does not mean that you cannot monitor your students.

In Assessment Center, adding a second teacher is pretty simple. You go to Class Details and add a new teacher just the same way you add a new student to the class. This teacher will have full access to the class, and can make assignments, create assessments, add students, delete students, and of course delete results. In short, anything that a lead teacher can do, this teacher can do too. Adding a new teacher to a class is not something that you should do without giving it some thought. Be sure that you and the person you are sharing the class with will be able to work together with good communication. It's a great way to have someone share the load with you, and it's a great way to cooperate with a teacher who has equal responsibility for the class.

In Skills Tutor, the same procedure is not possible. Only one teacher can have ownership of a class. This doesn't mean that a second teacher can't monitor the progress of a student however. In Skills Tutor, the data stays with a student, not with a class. This means that a teacher who shares responsibility can create a class with the same population and can monitor a student's progress by using the Student Detail report. This report will show the results of any student work done in subject areas that are selected for the report.

It's not the same as sharing the class, but it does provide data. If two teachers really need to share a Skills Tutor class, they will have to share a username and password.

Remember, these are two separate programs owned by two companies. They are brought together under the umbrella of Skills Iowa. Sometimes, the differences in the company procedures can cause confusion. What we have to remember is that both of these are great programs with different procedures that can help our students increase achievement.

OK, I turned off my pop up blocker, and my report still didn't load....

2008-10-25T08:50:00.001-05:00

If you are like many people, you may still have another pop up blocker in force. People using a Windows machine frequently have a Google Toolbar installed that can also have a pop up blocker. If you see a Google search bar at the top of your browser window, look to the right of it. If you see something like "2 sites blocked" you have another pop up blocker in place. You can either turn it off, or have it allow the Skills Iowa sites.

Pop up blockers are not the friends of Skills Iowa!

Conferencing and Skills Iowa

2008-10-24T09:37:00.000-05:00

With conference time coming up at lots of Iowa schools right now, communications with parents come to the forefront. Parents frequently want as much information about their students as they can get. They want to know what they can do to help, and the want to know how their student is progressing.

Skills Iowa can help with all of these needs. First and foremost, the reports features in both of our programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor can help you paint the picture of a student's achievement as well as a student's efforts at school. In Assessment Center and Skills Tutor you can print reports that only report on one student at a time. Parents can use the data there as a point of discussion with you and with their student. In Assessment Center, go to the class in question by clicking on its name on the home page. Next click on Reports from the menu links on the left. Once the page refreshes, you will get a listing of six report types. For individuals, you want to look at the last two reports. The Overall Student Performance report is the most wide spread report. It will give you the student's performance on every skill over which he/she has been assessed in your class. The Student Performance Report is intended to show the results on selected assessments. Both of the reports will give you comprehensive information about the student, and will in fact lead to the same information. It is the organization which will be different. Two other features of Assessment Center which you may want to point out to parents are the Skills Resources and Practice Quizzes selections. Each of these is a great way for parents to be involved in their student's learning process. The Skills Resources are web based activities that parents and or students can print off and work on together or alone, and the Practice Quizzes are short, narrow quizzes that test individual skills. These can help relieve test anxiety, and can be great practice for students to use to get accustomed to the procedures of the program.

For Skills Tutor, the process is a bit easier. Choose the class you want to use, and then click on reports. From there, you can choose one of two reports, Student Detail or Parent Letter. Both of these reports are identical with the exception of one addition on the Parent Letter where you can type a note that you will use for the entire class. Each student's report will contain the same note. You can, of course, choose to make a handwritten note on each student's report to personalize it, or you can choose to make the conversation the personalized contact. These two reports can cover any subjects you choose to have on them and can cover any time period you choose. For conference time, you probably want to choose to show all work covered up until the time the quarter ended. The report will show how much time a student has spent on each activity, what score and percentage the student achieved, and what date and time of day the student did the work.

The one thing that could cause you trouble in creating these reports is having your pop up blocker activated. The pop up blocker will not allow reports to be created. If you are being taken back to a previous page instead of being taken to a report, then you have a pop up blocker stopping the progress. Turn off the blocker, and you will be in business.

Did you administer the early Math Benchmark Tests?

2008-10-23T22:08:00.000-05:00

If you did, you really need to look for trends by using the Assessment Results Report.

The results at the top of the page will help you get an idea about class trends. It will help you identify the success of your school's math program, but it really isn't a good place to make big decisions about individual student ability and achievement. Keep in mind that each student had only one question about each skill that was tested. Most of us would like a bigger sample used to see if we knew what we were being held accountable for.

The second part of this report will identify the students who have not yet taken the assessment. The decision is yours, but as the year progresses and you have taught more of the material that some of your students had not been taught before taking the test, the results will start to be diluted. You may want to examine the results of the assessment now rather than waiting for those results to come in.

The last part of this report may be the most important section. The bar graph at the bottom of the page shows class results by skill. These bars show the distribution of student performance in each of these skills. You can find which students performed well on a skill and which didn't. This might not be as important as looking at the class performance. One suggestion is to take a look at the skills that you would have expected your students would not have done well on. If this is a skill that they have never been taught, the results might be taken as interesting, but not necessarily important since there would be little expectation of high performance. The next group to look at might be the skills that you have already taught this year. If your students, as a class, did pretty well on these skills, you have some indication of how well the class mastered this skill. If your results are mixed on one or more of these skills, you should probably prepare another assessment that has enough questions on this skill, or these skills to be reliable, and not so many that you have to give up a lot of class time for the administration of the test. Reteaching these skills will not be easier any time later in the year. Finally, look at the skills you really expect that students should have a solid foundation in when they come to your class. If your students do have that foundation, great. If, from the results of the assessment, they don't appear to have that understanding, you should probably think about another assessment for these skills too. You need to make a decision about how you will address these deficiencies.

This is what formative assessments are all about. It is a matter of making adjustments to your educational plan. Sometimes you will be able to shorten the time that you had planned to use for teaching a concept, and sometimes you will have to go back and teach something that was not in the plan at all, but which is essential for the understanding of the entire course.

Nobody said it would be easy, but without the information provided, it would be easy to just move on without knowing why some students just didn't get it.

Wondering why a student who gets a high score on Reading Comprehension still gets assignments?

2008-10-20T13:14:00.002-05:00

This question comes up now and again. Why did my student get assigned all of the work in Skills Tutor's Reading Comprehension even though he got a 90% on the pretest? The answer? Reading Comprehension LL, A, B and C are not prescriptive. Neither are Reading Vocabluary A, B and C. Everything else in Skills Tutor is. In these two modules the pretests result in an all or nothing situation; either you take the pretest and get assigned everything, or you can set it up that you take the pretest and get nothing except the lessons that the teacher chooses.

If you want to use the Reading Comprehension pretests and not have them generate an assignment of all of the activities, you must uncheck the option that states that pretests can assign work based on the student's performance. This is the first year for this option, and we have found it to be especially useful for Reading Comprehension.

If you have made the assignment without unchecking this option, and would like to change this effect, go to Class Properties, click on Modify Assignment, and uncheck the option to give work based on pretest performance. Save the change by clicking on Done, and you're in business.

Best Practices

2008-10-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

What's the best way to use Skills Iowa? That's a question we hear a lot in our training sessions, but the answer that we must give is that we are not sure what is the best way to use our programs in your situation. One thing we do know however is that research about how people learn does exist. Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers cite evidence in their book Student Achievement Through Staff Development, 3rd Edition (ASCD 2002) that achievement occurs through a progression of techniques.

They use these steps: Theory, Demonstration, Practice, and Coaching. These are all solid parts of raising achievement, but it is important to note where the achievement numbers reach the point of transference to increased achievement.

Study of the theory behind a concept is important. The inquisitive in the room will always want to know why something works the way it does. The transfer of studying the theory to the student's achievement however is 0%. That probably doesn't really surprise anyone. If we only talk about something, it doesn't usually stick with kids.

So what happens when we use demonstrations of the concept. Our classes get to see what happens, they can watch the phenomena in action. The difference this makes in achievement? Once again, Joyce and Showers indicate that this is still 0%. Once students understand the concept, the demonstration might come back to them, but by itself, it doesn't make the difference in achievement that we are after.

Practice makes perfect is something that we have all grown up with, and surely it must be right, but Joyce and Showers' research shows disappointing results on this one as well. Practice on its own only leads to making a 5% difference in achievement. This is where jaws usually drop. "Really? Only 5%?" Thinking about it makes sense however. Imperfect practice leads to imperfect results. How is a student to know what parts of the practice are incorrect?

The really good news here is that coaching does make a huge difference. Coaching has a 95% transference to increasing achievement. Teachers probably do this without really thinking about it. Showing a student where his/her math work went wrong, or helping a student edit an awkwardly worded passage are both examples of coaching. The truth of this is that effective teachers are coaching all of the time. ALL of the four steps are important parts of the teaching process, but finishing the job is what makes the difference. We must coach the kids through the process.

So, what are the implications of Joyce and Showers work for working with Skills Iowa? What steps do we need to use to increase student achievement? In short, all of them. We can't expect that giving assessments will lead to increased achievement unless we are running the reports and acting upon them, and we cannot expect that giving Skills Tutor lessons will replace the importance of an effective, highly qualified teacher. What we can know is that the opportunity for practice that is offered through Skills Tutor is part of the process, and we also know that the results of Assessment Center help the teacher target which parts of a unit of study have already been mastered and which parts will need more study.

The tools offered in Skills Iowa are parts of the process. Of course there are many other tools that effective teachers can use to accomplish the same end. The point is that we must understand the effectiveness of the practices we are using. All good teachers work hard; if we are to increase achievement, we must also consider what the research says about increasing achievement.

Skills Iowa and Pop Up Blockers

2008-10-15T21:18:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest cause of problems with Skills Iowa's two programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor is the use of pop up blockers. If you are having a problem with a page not appearing, check to see if your pop up blocker is on. It may be that you have more than one pop up blocker in effect on your computer. Start by going to the Tools menu on a windows machine or the Safari menu on a Mac. If the pop up is on, turn it off, or tell it to allow pop ups for this web site. Next, you might have a pop up blocker in a Google tool bar. Turn this off as well. It is possible that the school has a pop up blocker on that can only be administered by your tech person. If this is the case, you must ask him/her to allow pop ups for asc.princetonreview.com and www.myskillstutor.com.

The short word on pop ups is that they will create problems for Skills Iowa's programs.

Shared Assessments in Assessment Center

2008-10-11T07:16:00.000-05:00

If other teachers in your building teach the same subject at the same grade level, you may decide that you want to share assessments with them.

When creating your assessment, you must make the decision to share or not share on the first page of the creation process. To share the assessment, click on the "Share this assessment, so that other educators can search for it." After doing this, the rest of the assessment creation process is exactly the same as any other assessment. The only aspect that you may want to give extra consideration is the naming process. While you might know what Math 4 Assessment 4 means, your other staff members may not. Naming the assessment with something from the topics being covered is helpful for other staff members.

To assign an assessment that another teacher has created and shared, go to your class main page for the class you want. Once there, click on the Assessments link from the links on the left side of the page. By default, the Search for Assessments window will come up on your screen. The window is only one text line high and is about three inches long. Type the search criteria in the window, i.e. 4th Math. Click on Search. (Note: Hitting the Enter key on your keyboard doesn't do the same thing as clicking Search.) The page will refresh and a list of assessments matching your search criteria will appear.

The blue buttons above the list of assessments will allow you to preview the assessments and to assign them as well. To assign one of the assessments, click on the box in front of its name, and then click the blue Assign button. Once you have done this, you will be able to continue with the assigning process just as you would for a test that you have created.

Working together with other staff members in the creation process can help you to save some time and help evaluation by using standard procedures within departments.

If you need help using this skill, or any other, please contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor Level Indicators

2008-10-03T21:41:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest questions we get about Skills Tutor is what the A, B and C mean behind a lesson. These are indicators about the level of difficulty of the lessons. A is roughly at a third/fourth grade level. B is at a fifth/sixth grade level and C is at a seventh/eighth grade level. In the one case where it exists in Reading Comprehension, LL is for lower level third grade readers.

Beginning Math and Beginning Language Arts lessons are for struggling learning in elementary school.

The rest of the lessons do not have a grade level designation, and are generally considered appropriate for high school students.

Skills Tutor Resources

2008-09-29T18:08:00.001-05:00

Skills Tutor offers a number of wonderful resources right on the home page. To get to this page, log in to asc.princetonreview.com Once at the Assessment Center site, click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side. You will be redirected to the Skills Tutor site.

At this site, you can view any of the activities that you can assign by using the View Activity link. This is a good practice if you are using and activity to demonstrate to the entire class over a projector or if you are going over a skill with an individual student.

You can also click on the View Tutorials link and get instructions and examples of many of the items used in Skills Tutor. One that we frequently use in training is the Sample Accountability Reports. This will give you a good example of most of the reports used in Skills Tutor.

A resource that is often overlooked is the View Guides and Worksheets link. This link will download a teachers' manual for the module you select. These frequently have lesson summaries, examples, and reproducible worksheets.

Take a look around at the Skills Tutor 1st page. You'll find something useful.

Did you administer the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark Assessment?

2008-09-27T20:10:00.000-05:00

If you did, you will want to check the reports. If you are an administrator, log in to your building administrator account. If you are a teacher, log in as you normally do.

For administrators, choose the Reports link on the left. From the resulting list, choose the Assessments Results report and then select the subject and grade. In this case we will select Math. You should see a list of assessments, which should include the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark assessment. Select that, and then view your report.

For teachers, select the class you want to work with and then select Reports. Choose Assessment Results and then choose the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark assessment from the list of assessments. Finally, select the Show Report button to view your report.

You will also be receiving the data from other Skills Iowa schools who have administered the assessment. We hope that you have found Assessment Center easy to use and that more importantly, that you have found the data generated from the assessment useful in driving your instructional program.

What happens if my students can't finish a lesson?

2008-09-24T12:21:00.000-05:00

Students who are not able to finish a lesson or assessment in one sitting do not lose what they have done. In both of our programs, the student will be be able to resume work where they left off.

In Skills Tutor, most of the lessons support a technology called bookmarking. The process is invisible and seamless. All a student needs to do is to click on the activity they were unable to complete, and the program will load to their point of departure. A book flipping pages will appear on the screen to let the student know what is happening. A student will not have to go through the entire first part of the lesson again; he/she can just resume work on that lesson.

In Assessment Center, the student can just click on the Continue button which will appear after the name of the assessment in the student's list of assessments.

Where do my students log in?

2008-09-24T12:13:00.000-05:00

One question that comes up now and again is, "Where do my students log in?" The answer is simple. They log in the same place you do: asc.princetonreview.com

Since they are students, the page that loads for them is slightly different than the page you see when you log in, but some of the geography is the same. They also have links on the left side that will take them to different functions and also to their Skills Tutor home page. You can see the student page in this blog entry.

In the past, many schools logged in at www.myskillstutor.com. Once there, they needed a username, password and a site id. Since students can log in at the Assessment Center site, there is really little reason to log in at the Skills Tutor site. The only reason to log in there is to make the choice to have the supported modules speak the instructions in Spanish.

To keep things as simple as possible for you and your students, logging in at asc.princetonreview.com is our best choice.

Skills Tutor Report Loading Problems

2008-09-21T13:05:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people report problems with their Skills Tutor reports not loading. There are two causes of this problem. The number one cause is having a pop-up blocker in effect. If you have this situation, try holding down on the control key while you give the final command that will load the report. If this doesn't work, you may find success by turning your pop-up blocker off completely. If your district has the ability to allow pop-ups for specified web sites, you should request that www.myskillstutor.com pop-ups be allowed to load.

The other cause is not having access to a PDF reader. The most often used reader on a Mac or Windows is Adobe Acrobat Reader; however, Preview on a Mac could handle this task as well. It may be that you have not opened your copy of either program for the first time, and it needs to be opened and have the usage agreement dealt with. If you have to have administrative access to do this at your school, ask your tech person for assistance. If you can open other PDF files, this is not your problem, and you should look into pop-up blockers.

As always, contact your project leader if you need some assistance with this.