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!

Overall Skills Performance Report

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

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?

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?

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...

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.