Adding a second teacher to a class

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....

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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.