Individual Student Reports

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.

The End is Near...

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!

Is your report not loading?

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

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.

Compare Assessments Report and Math Benchmark Assessments

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.

Have you checked the reports lately?

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.

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 Skills Iowa Math Benchmark Assessment?

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.

Assessment Center: Overall Student Performance Report

Some of our member schools are going to be starting summer school very soon. If you have been giving regular assessments in Assessment Center, you can easily discover which tested skills the student in question needs to revisit in order to reach mastery.

Just log in to Assessment Center, click on the class in question and then click on reports. Next, click on Overall Student Performance. On the resulting page, select the individual student you are looking for and then select the desired subject area and click Show Report.

You will receive a report showing the student's percentages in the tested skills. This report can be a great help when planning a course of study for the summer.  

One of the tools you can use to address the low percentages is Skills Tutor. You can create an individualized set of practice lessons for each student. It's a great help to have each student have an available activity while you are working with other students. The students can also do the Skills Tutor lessons over and over.

Don't forget that you can create new assessments in a few minutes that will help you monitor the progress during any period of study. There is no need to keep teaching a concept that a student has mastered.

Do you have good tips on how you use Skills Iowa in your summer school?  Let us know!  Join us in the comments.

Assessment Center Teacher Tip: Overall Class Performance by Standard Report

The Overall Class Performance by Standard report is a useful tool to see how well a class has mastered a skill that has been administered over several assessments. This report will show what percentage of the class has fallen into each of the four performance levels. By clicking on any of the percentages in the bars that represent each skill, you will be sent to a page with the names of the students who fall into each performance category and you will also get their percentages for that skill.

To use the report, log in to Assessment Center and click on the name of the class you want to work with. Next, click on Reports, and when the page refreshes, click on Overall Class Performance by Standard. On the next page, select the subject you have assessed (remembering that ELA is reading) and the type of assessment that has been given. If you are a teacher and have created the assessment, you want to choose teacher created, TPR means The Princeton Review. Then, click Show Report. Your report will will show on the next page. Click on any skill, and you will be shown the list of students who have fallen into each of the four performance categories. To print this report, it is best to use the window just above the report that says, "Select a Format". You will probably want to select Acrobat (PDF) file. As always, your computer will deal with an Acrobat file the way it deals with all PDF files; it will either save it to a specified place (usually your desktop), it will open it, or it will open it from within your browser. You will need to print the report from within whatever program your computer is set up to use for PDF files. If you need help with this report, or any report, just contact your project leader.

This information will allow the teacher to determine which students have mastered the skill, and which still need more work on it. It's a fast easy report to use for a quick look at the performance of the class.

Skills Tutor Tip: Using the Student Detail Report

Skills Tutor has many great reports, but if you are looking for the most comprehensive information about an individual student, you want the Student Detail Report.

To get started, click on the Reports link in the left menu, and on the next screen, you will see Student Detail listed among the classroom reports. First, indicate the class for which you want information in the small window in the center of the page. Next, click on Student Detail. What will result is a list of the students in that class; either you can click Select All from the menu on the left or you can select the individual student or students for whom you need information, and then, click Continue on the left. The next screen is a list of all subject areas in Skills Tutor. You can either Select All to insure that you have all areas in which a student has worked, or you can select the subject areas that you are interested in. Next, click Continue and on the screen that results select the time period for which you are interested. After selecting the time period, click Continue and the report will start to download.

Depending on how your computer is configured to work with PDF files, the report will either open, download to your desktop, or be displayed from within your browser. If you have trouble with this, ask your school's technology person for some help, or contact your project leader.

This report will show every student's complete Skills Tutor work history for the selected time period and subjects selected. It will not only show the score for an activity; it will also show how many times a student has done the activity, how many minutes the student spent on the activity, the percentage, and the time of day the student did the work. Having all of this information helps you get a complete picture of how a student is using Skills Tutor.

Remember, each lesson in Skills Tutor is limited to a single skill, so the percentage a student has scored on an activity is the student's performance percentage for that skill.

Still need more help? Contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor Tip: Finding and Using the Gradebook Report

Skills Tutor breaks down its reports into two main groups: Assignment Reports and Class Reports. After clicking on the Reports link on the left side of a Skills Tutor page, you will see all of the Class reports, but you will have to click on Assignment reports to find the Gradebook report.

After clicking on an assignment on the right and then clicking Gradebook, you will get a report that matches our expectations of what we might find in any gradebook. One feature that is unique however, is that Skills Tutor will display a "-" rather than a score for a student who has been assigned a prescriptive pretest and has tested out of a particular skill.

There are two things to remember. First, this is a report for only one assignment, not for everything that a student has done in Skills Tutor. The second point to remember is that this report is a bit slow to download, especially if your class is large and your assignment is comprehensive. There is a lot of data in this report!

The Gradebook report displays the student's last, best score. If you need to see all of the information on a given student, take a look at the Student Detail report.

If you have comments on how you are using the gradebook, please take a moment to give your feedback in the comments. If you need more assistance in using this report, please contact your project leader.

Assessment Center Teacher Tip: Assessment Results Report

Assessment Center offers six reports to the teacher. The first of these reports is called Assessment Results. This is a great report to get a quick overview of the performance of the entire class on one particular assessment. Let's take a look at three of the main features of this report.

First, the class gets broken down into four performance groups: Below Standards, Approaching Standards, Meets Standards, and Exceeds Standards. In each of these divisions, the teacher gets an alphabetical listing of each of the students who fall into those categories. Each of these students has, following his or her name, the percentage which he or she received on this assessment. Clicking on this percentage will take the teacher to that student's assessment. There, the teacher can not only see how the student answered each question on the assessment, but can also see a breakdown of how the student performed on each skill on the assessment. This can be very helpful in answering the question of, "What part did the student not understand?". This report can also quickly point out which students need reteaching of the skill, which can use some practice, and which are ready for enrichment activities.

The next part of this report is a list of students who have not yet taken the assessment. Simple, but important information!

Finally, the teacher will find a series of bar graphs. The bar graphs are designed to show how a class performed on each of the skills found in the assessment. Obviously, this is more useful than the entire percentage since it points out where students are struggling, and where they are showing mastery of a skill. Each of the performance groups is represented on the bar by a percentage of the class who fell into this performance group. Again, there are two easy uses of the report. First, the teacher can quickly see what percentage of the class has met the standard, and how many need more work. Secondly, by clicking on the percentage representing each segment of the bar, the teacher can drill down and get a list of the students who fall into that performance group on that skill. The resulting report will look much like the first part of the Assessment Results report in that there will be four lists showing which students have fallen into each group, but the difference is that this information is representing just one skill, not the entire assessment.

If you have comments about how you use this report, please share it with others by clicking on the comments line below this post. If you have questions about how to use this report, contact your project leader.