Reading Comprehension and Skills Tutor

This year, Skills Tutor allows a pretest to be administered without it being prescriptive. This means that you can give a pretest and then look at the results and differentiate your assignments based upon the student's scores. 

The example above shows the Give Assignment page. The Reading Comprehension pretest at grade level was administered to each student in the class. The teacher unchecked the box which states: Pretests can assign activities based on the student's score, meaning the pretest WILL NOT assign further lessons.  Using the Gradebook report, the teacher made a decision to assign reading skills lessons to students at a reading level that was appropriate to each student. Some were assigned lessons that were below grade level; most of the students were assigned the lesson at grade level, and a few of the students were assigned lessons that were above grade level. 

The lesson illustrated is for Reading Comprehension, but this could be done in many of the categories. In Language Arts, Math, and Reading Vocabulary there are similar lessons available for students who are at different levels of progress on the subject. It's easy to give the pretest, make several assignments on similar skills at different levels, and assign the appropriate lessons.  Assess/Analyze/Act.  Skills Iowa helps make this a manageable practice.

Once a student starts to show proficiency at a level, it is time to add the lesson at the next higher level so the student can advance. 

Skills Tutor Guides and Worksheets

Skills Tutor offers an extensive teachers guide for each division offered. For instance, you can get a complete teacher guide for Reading Comprehension C, Math A, or any other division.

These guides are accessed on the opening page of Skills Tutor, and are listed as View Guides and Worksheets. 

There are a number of useful tools in the guides, including worksheets that accompany many of the lessons that are offered in Skills Tutor. One of the features of these worksheets is the inclusion of writing and art prompts. Using these can extend the lesson and can add to the rigor of the assignment.

Your school probably received several large spiral bound books containing all of these worksheets, but if you or your principal don't know the location of these books, the entire contents is always available online. 

The Guides and Worksheets document will be a downloaded PDF document. If you have difficulty viewing it, you may need to ask your technology director how your school's computers deal with PDFs. You may need to override your popup blocker to view this document.

Need help? Contact your project leader.

Using the "Enforce Date Range" setting

In Assessment Center, one can utilize the "Enforce Time Range" for several uses. This option is found on the Assignment page, and is listed as one of the Additional Settings.

If you want to set a time range during which an assessment is available, just click on the box in front of the words "Enforce Date Range" and then click on the "Select" box after the Start Date and End Date labels.  A calendar will come up under each box in which you can click on the desired start and end dates. Another way you can select these dates is to just type in the month/day/year, i.e. 12/05/08. By making this choice, you have made the assessment available for just the dates you are indicating. The default when making this selection is a two week time period, but you can make any choice you choose.  This choice is useful if you are making a pretest that you want to use to determine if instruction has been effective once you give a post test. You don't want the test to linger too long or the results will be tainted by the instruction that are underway.

Another use of the "Enforce Date Range" is to make a series of assessments that you will have come up at regular intervals over a period of time. This is very useful if you are giving reading comprehension assessments to determine a student's current and cumulative reading skill achievement. To use the choice in this way, click on the Start Date box for the first assessment. Enter the start date in the Start Date box, and then enter a date in the End Date box that is one year from your start date, i.e. Start Date: 10/01/08 and End Date: 10/01/09. Setting the date in this way will mean that the assessment will be available all of the current school year. It is not desirable that these tests would expire. Since assigned assessments are listed in your list of assessments by their due date rather than by their start date, you will know when each assessment starts by knowing that its due date is one year later than its start date. The advantage of using this method is that you can create a large number of assessments at a time when you have time available to use later at a time when you might not have time available. 

As always, if you would like assistance with this or any other questions about Skills Iowa, please contact your project leader.

New Students and Assignments

By this time in the year, it is likely that you have had a new student enter your class. Assuming that the person in charge of creating new accounts has created an account for the new student, you will still need to do a few things.

First, sign in to Assessment Center and select the class in which you want to enroll the student. Next, click on the "Class Details" link on the left side of the page. One of the topics that pops up under this link is "Add/Remove Students". Click on this link and enroll the student you are missing by clicking on the name in the left column and then clicking "Save". The new student is now enrolled in your Assessment Center class, and will be available on all of your new assignments, but he/she has not been assigned existing assignments. If you want to assign an existing assignment to this student, click on Assessments in the links on the left. Once the page refreshes, put a check mark in front of the assessment you want to assign, and click on the assign button above the list of assessments. You will want to try this for all of the existing assessments, BUT it will not work. You must assign the assessments one at a time. Once you have done this, you must add the student to the assessment, and then click next and then save on the resulting page.

This student is now enrolled in Assessment Center and in 2009, the class as well as the enrollment has also been created in Skills Tutor. Click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side of the page. Once you are in Skills Tutor click "Classes" and select the class you want to use and click on class properties. You will want to go to the "Give Assignments" page where you can select the assignments you want to give to the new student by clicking on them and clicking on "Done".

As always, if you have problems using either of our programs, contact your project leader.

Which browser should you use for Skills Iowa?

The simple answer is the one that works for you.

In our experience, Safari on a Mac and Explorer on a Windows machine are your best choices. However, in a few isolated instances, we have encountered problems using Safari. Something on an individual network may prevent Safari from working as it should. In these cases, we have tried Firefox; however, in some instances, Firefox can display operations symbols incorrectly in math. SO, the solution in at least one case was to use Camino, a less known browser. It is a free download, and if all else fails, give it a try.

IF you are using Firefox and are encountering a problem getting more than four reading passages in any given category, the problem is somewhere in the way Firefox interacts with Assessment Center. The solution? Safari or Camino on a Macintosh or Explorer on Windows.

The way a particular network can be configured is difficult to decipher, but give your project leader a call if things don't work. He or she may not know how to solve your exact problem, but they will know where to direct you to find help.

Looking for something?

In the upper left corner of this blog page, there is a search window. Type in one or two key words of what you are looking for; click search, and all of the articles that contain your search word or words will show up on your screen.

For instance, you might search for "Skills Tutor" or "Assessment Center". Another more specific example would be "Reports". Of course, the more specific you get, the less you will have to scroll through, but you might just find something that you didn't know you could use.

Try the search feature.

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.