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.

Having trouble accessing the Assessment Center website?

If you have recently experienced difficulty trying to sign in to Skills Iowa using Assessment Center, you may be using the old address, asc.princetonreview.com. Assessment Center initiated a new address in late summer, ac.corek12.com. The old address was redirecting the user to the new site until the first of October. From now on, the old address will not work. You can only access Skills Iowa through the new address.

ac.corek12.com

Benchmark Round One

Our first round of benchmark assessments has concluded, and they have been a resounding success. Thousands of benchmarks were given, and this will give all of the participating schools great comparison data.

The two biggest problems that were encountered involved turning off the pop-up blockers and making sure that classes were created properly. The pop-up problem is pretty simple, and the class creation problem requires that ELA or Math at the appropriate grade level must be in the course list on your class details. We found our way through these problems. A couple of other problems that arose involved students not being enrolled in the class and teachers not realizing that a test code must be entered to take the assessment.

The real reason for the benchmark assessments is to get a look at how your school, building and classroom are doing in some of the essential skills which are tested in the Iowa Core Curriculum. The data raises a lot of questions, and that is a valuable part of the educational discussions that must take place in schools. This one small piece of data may help you and your school make decisions not only applying to your classroom but to district goals as well. We hope the classroom teachers will validate individual classroom results with further formative assessments. Larger samplings of questions that zero in on single skills will help teachers make even further instructional decisions.

The next round of reading benchmarks starts on October 5th, and the next math benchmark assessment will begin on January 4th.

If you have further questions about the benchmark assessments, you can look at the benchmark information at our website, www.skillsiowa.org or you can contact your project leader.

How are things going?

We'd like to know. If you are having problems, let us know. If you do have a problem, be sure you give us all of the information you can. Give us the username/password of the student who is having problems. If it's you with a problem, send your username/password. We'll be able to help you better. If it's with a specific test or class, give us the name of the assessment or class. We'll get back to you sooner if you give us the full picture.

If you are finding success, and things work beautifully, we'd love to hear that kind of information too. We'd like to opportunity to share your success stories and great ideas with other Skills Iowa teachers.

Let us know!

October 2nd ends the 1st benchmark window.

If you have not yet administered the first math and reading benchmark assessments, your time is running short. Both of these initial benchmarks end at midnight on October 2nd.

You will not have another opportunity to give another math benchmark assessment until January 4th, but you will get a monthly reading assessment. If you have to choose which one you will not do if you run short on time, taking the math assessment is probably more critical.

You will want to allow enough time to complete the math assessment. It has 30 questions, so it will take somewhere around an entire class period or more to take.

Of course, you will be able to create your own math, language arts and reading assessments to give at any time. The benefit of the benchmark assessments to you and your students is the comparison to other Skills Iowa schools who have taken these assessments.

Remember to turn off your pop-up blockers for these assessments to load.

Is your benchmark assessment working correctly?

If your students are loading the correct number for a benchmark assessment and the assessment is not coming up, one of a few things might be happening.

Number 1: There is a pop-up blocker in place on your computer. There might be two if you have a Google toolbar on that computer. You must turn off all pop-up blockers.

Number 2: Your school may be blocking our site from pop-ups even though things worked last year. We have a new address (ac.corek12.com). You may need to have your technology person change the settings to allow this new address.

Number 3: The student not getting in to the assessment may not be in a class. If the student has been recently created and not yet enrolled in an Assessment Center class, that student will not be considered a valid recipient for that assessment.

Number 4: The student may have already completed the assessment. Once the assessment has been taken, the student cannot retake it.

Number 5: The time period of availability for this assessment may not have arrived, or it may have already passed.

If you are having problems that do not fit one of these situations, please contact your project leader for help.

The Benchmark Tests are Live!

If you haven't yet noticed, you have at least one assessment in your class that you did not create or assign. This is the benchmark test in math or reading (ELA). Your students will need to use the test code protection which has been provided to your principal and possibly a lead teacher in your building. You can also see the test code listed with the assessment when you view the assessment in your list of assessments. Check out the information about the benchmarks on: www.skillsiowa.org

One thing you must be certain to do for the benchmark to work is to have the pop-up blockers on student computers turned off. With a test code, these tests become pop-ups and they will be blocked if the pop-up blocker is on. If you need help with this, contact your school's technology leader or contact your project leader.

The benchmark data is a great way to see how your students are doing.