Which assessments appear automatically?

As you know, Skills Iowa has created and assigned ELA (reading comprehension) and Math benchmark assessments for your classes. These assessments appear automatically at predetermined intervals. The ELA assessments appear on the first Monday of each month and end on the last Friday of each month. The Math assessments appear three times a year, and the next one will appear on January 4th. The level of the assessment you get for your class is determined by the choices you made when you created your class. Our request is that you give these assessments at the grade level that your student is in, not for the achievement level which you have determined to be correct for your student. This is the same procedure that your school uses for standardized testing. IF you are finding that you have assessments showing up for a different grade level each month, then it is likely that you entered multiple grade levels in your class creation process.

If you want to edit this to remove the incorrect grade designation, log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in question. Next, click on Class Details on the left side and then click on the Edit button at the top of the resulting page. Scroll down on this page to the course list and make sure that you have only ELA and Math designations for the correct grade level. If you have additional levels, you should remove them. The easiest way to make this correct is to click on the "Click Here" link just above the Course List designations. This will align your class to the grade level you have chosen earlier in the creation process. IF you have a multi-level class, you should not make this change.

Making this change will make unwanted assessments disappear from your assessment list.

Two good ideas

There is always a concern about how to use the data from the we gather when we use Assessment Center assessments. If you are giving Reading assessments (ELA) here are two good ideas.

A teacher in Pocahontas Area Elementary has her students take her assessments on paper to control the climate of the room and also to allow her to make the assessment more authentic. She has her students go to the passage and write the number of the question next to the part of the passage that contains the answer. In this way, she slows down the students, and encourages them to go back to the passage and take some time to make sure they understand the question and are confident that they have answered it correctly.

A second teacher in the same school has his students go over the printed assessments after they have taken the assessment. He has the students work in pairs to discuss each missed question and together they have to find the answer in the text. This works on student communication and helps students explain their thinking to another student.

Both of these techniques are great ways to have your students increase their understanding of the passages they read. Both of these ideas are simple to implement, and easy for students to understand.

Good job!

It was a tough week!

The week of the December 09 Blizzard was a tough week for school. I imagine that kids were getting a little bored by the end of Thursday. Hopefully, some of your kids took advantage of the assignments you made in Skills Tutor. It's a good way for them to keep fresh on the skills you are, or rather would have been covering in class this week. There is no reason that those with computers at home can't do work that will be engaging and will keep them on track during a snow day.

Now would be a good time to sit down and plan what you would like your kids to do over the upcoming break. You can do review assignments in Reading Comprehension, Math, and Language Arts. You could also do introductory lessons in the units that you are going to be starting after break. For those of you who are looking at semester tests when you get back from break or before break, this is a good time to create those and let the kids know they are there. Kids get tired of television after a day or two, and lots of families will be getting new computers for Christmas gifts. What a great opportunity.

Remember to take your username and password home with you. If you get a snow day, you can quickly go online and create a "Snow Day Assignment" for your kids to work on. Let them know that just because they aren't in your room that their education doesn't have to come to a halt for that day.

If you need any help with Skills Tutor, log in to www.skillsiowa.org and click on the Documents link. The Quick Reference guide for both programs is listed there for you to download.

Enjoy the season!

Creating a New Student Account

If you have gotten a new student in your class, someone has to create a new Skills Iowa account for that student. This is a situation that can be handled in your school in a number of ways. This is something that you can easily do, but something that you do not want another teacher to duplicate. To be safe, the first thing to do is to open the class the student will be enrolled in. Next, click on Class Details and from the menus under that, click Add/Remove Student. You will have two windows on the screen that appears. The one on the left will have students who are in your school at the designated grade level, but not in your class. The window on the right will have those students already enrolled in your class. To be safe, you need to look through the list of names in the window on the left to see if someone else has already created the new account. If the student is not there, no one has created the account at that grade level. It is possible that someone has created the account at the wrong grade level however, so to be sure of this, go to the menu above the windows that says Students in Grade ? and switch your choice to Students in the School. This should be everyone not in your class. If the student is not in this list, you can create the new account.

Above the windows is a link that says: Click here to create a new student account. Click on the click here link. Click on the Next link on the resulting page. On the next page, enter the student's first name, last name, grade, unique id (10 digit state id, or another unique id you create), and password (first initial and first five letters of last name or complete last name if it is shorter than five letters.) You can also click on the box in front of the name of your class to enroll this student in your class. Click on Next and on the next page, review the spellings of the student's name. If all is correct, click on Next and on the following page, you can copy the student's new usernamen and password before you click on Done.

The student is now in your class, but has not been given any of the Assessment Center assessments or the Skills Tutor assignments. To see how to give the student this work, click here.

Locating a Skill in Assessment Center

Sometimes it's not so easy to find the skill you want to assess in Assessment Center's Iowa Core Curriculum alignment, Essential Skills and Concepts. Of course, you can select and open all of the options and look through them, but there is another way you could proceed.

Skill Resources contains a search function that is intended to help you find an additional resource to address a skill with additional activities. This search can also help you find where in the assessment alignment this skill is located. For example, let's say you wanted to make an assessment for your 6th grade math class covering ratios. Click on Skill Resources. Select Math and 6th. In the search criteria, enter ratios and click on search. You will get a list of the topics which contain ratios. Look at the number/letter combination which precedes the skill; this is the designation for the skill you want to assess. For instance, in the example you can see that the topic falls under 6.N. When you create an assessment, look for the section labeled 6.N (Numbers and Operations) and open this section by clicking on the plus sign to the left of it. From the resulting list, put a check mark in front of 6.N.4, the next part of the code. Click Next to proceed. On the next page, click on the plus sign in front of 6.N.4 and then look for 6.N.4.e. Open this link and proceed by selecting the number of questions you want. Remember to open the very first section to remove the unwanted question that was selected by the program in the first section. Continue creating your assessment as you would normally.

This is a pretty quick way to see if the skill is covered in Assessment Center. Give it a try!

Pausing a Skills Tutor Lesson

Pausing an assessment in Assessment Center is easy; there's a pause test button at the bottom of the testing page. Pausing a lesson in Skills Tutor is less obvious, but just as easy. All of the Skills Tutor lessons except Algebra, Science 1 and 2, Information Skills and Workforce Readiness will pause automatically when a student closes them before finishing. If at least one question in the activity has been answered, the next time the student opens that lesson, an animation of a book flipping pages will appear and take the student to the point where he or she left off. Actually, the student has no other option for that lesson except to start it at that point.

Of course, all Skills Tutor lessons except the pretests can be taken as many times as a student chooses. If a student can't finish a lesson in the time available, he/she doesn't have to start it from the beginning.

If you have more questions about using Skills Tutor, contact your project leader.

How are you using the data?

How are you using the data from your Assessment Center assessments? We've had a lot of benchmark assessments and teacher created assessments given this fall, and we're excited about that. The question is what are you doing with the data?

If you haven't already gone to reports to see how your students have done, try to find the time to check that out. For math, it's mostly a matter of seeing how your students did on the benchmark tests on concepts that you expected them to know when they came to you or to know by the time they took the assessment. Probably the easiest way to see how your students performed on a single assessment such as the benchmark assessments is to look at the Assessment Results report. While the scores at the top of the report showing each student's performance on the assessment are interesting and can tell you something about how seriously a student took the test, they shouldn't be used as a real sample of how well that student is doing in your class. After all, there is typically only one question on the skill, and they may perform better on a larger sampling. The assessment is more useful to see how your entire class did, and this information is found in the last part of the report where you find the multicolored bars. The red portion of the bar shows low performance and the blue part reflects high performance. Clicking on the bar will give you the names of the students who struggled and succeeded with this skill. More importantly however, is the idea that this is a skill which should be taught to the entire class or one that can be done in targeted instruction that will help remediate a group in your class. In math you may want to look at the performance in a given skill and make a decision to give an assessment of your own with more questions over the same skill. Just take note of the number/letter code in front of the skill and then create a new assessment that covers that exact same skill.

In ELA (reading comprehension) you may want to design a lesson plan around the passage that was used in the assessment. Print the passage out and distribute the passage section to your class. If your students struggled on inference, for instance, you could ask them an inferential question that they can answer in small groups. Have them find evidence in the passage that will support their answer. Have them discuss their ideas in small groups, and then have them write a short paragraph that answers the question. If they struggled on main idea, have them underline the most important sentence in every paragraph and then in 20 words or less, explain the main idea of the passage. Cause and effect cause your kids problems? Design a lesson which asks them to find the reason something happened and then what effect that action had; next, ask them to explain it in an outline, a short paragraph or a mind map.

The assessments you are giving your kids are just the starting points for increasing student achievement. It is only through using the data to drive your instruction that achievement increases.

If you want to get more ideas like these, sign up for the Skills Iowa Regional meetings. You can find the sign up information on the opening page of our website: www.skillsiowa.org