Assigning an Administrator Created Test

If you are an administrator who has created an assessment, or if you are a teacher who is going to assign an administrator created test, there are a few steps that you must follow before you can assign the test to students.

As an administrator, you need to make a decision about how you want to assign the assessment to students. You have several choices; you can make an assessment searchable, recommend an assessment to teachers to assign, assign an assessment directly to students to take online or offline, or you can change the test's status to unassigned/unavailable.

To do this, you must first create the assessment as an administrator, and when assigning it, choose one of the Assignment Details from the top of the assignment page. If you choose make searchable, teachers can search for your assessment, if you recommend it to educators, it will automatically appear in a teachers list of assessments and can be assigned. If you select the option to assign to students, the assignment will be assigned to all students in the grade level appropriate classes that are set to align with the chosen subject, for instance, any class aligned to Math7 will be assigned a 7th grade math assessment.



Once you have made your choice, proceed to the bottom of the page and click on Next, and at the top of the next page, click Assign. The Administrator's part of this process is now complete.

From the teacher's point of view, the process could take one of several paths. If the administrator has made the assessment searchable, you can choose a general search term such as Math and the desired grade level, or if you know the title, you can search for it directly. Once the assessment is found, you can click on the box in front of it and then click the Assign button at the top of the page.

If the administrator has recommended the assessment, it will appear in your list of assessments on the Assessment page for the selected class. Again, click in front of it and then click Assign.

If your administrator has assigned the assessment to your students, you have nothing to do other than instruct your students to take it.

If you have any questions about this process, contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor Changes

There are only a few changes in Skills Tutor this year, but one change can mean some real opportunities for teachers.

The change comes in the Add Assignment command. This year there are three new choices to make in a Skills Tutor assignment.

Change #1: The teacher can now choose to force a student to follow the order of the assignment lessons. This means that students cannot jump ahead to another lesson in the list until they have met the proficiency settings on this lesson. Teachers can choose to control this, or leave it checked so the program will behave as it has in the past.

Change #2: Teachers can choose to have a pretest assign lessons based on student performance or choose not to have the pretest assign lessons. This is a big change for Reading Comprehension and Reading Vocabulary where the pretests used to result in the assignment of all lessons that followed. Many teachers are now creating an assignment that just contains the pretest in Reading Comprehension. With this information, they can make choices about how to differentiate future lessons.

Change #3: Teachers can choose how many times the program will recommend an activity. The number of recommendations can be set between one to five times. Three is the default number.

We feel that these changes have created a great deal of flexibility for teachers. If you haven't noticed the new features, take a look the next time you make an assignment.