March 1, 2012

Sorry for such a delay in posting to the blog. Jim Lippold did it when he was still working for Skills Iowa. And then he decided it was time to retire and I just haven't been very good in keeping it going. Sorry 'bout that!

But today, March 1, starts a new commitment to blogging.

We'll have charts up on the website shortly that show the growth from fall to mid-year benchmarks in all three reading genres, as well as math. Then you'll be able to see how your school did compared to the state average. We're working on those right now. More soon...

Data Teams

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

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

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

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

New Student Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invalid Test Cut Off Values

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

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

Assess, Analyze, Act

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

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

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

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

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

Need to see how a student is doing with assignments?

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

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

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

Student Progress Report

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

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

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

Give it a try!