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.

Tips From the Blog

If you frequent the Skills Iowa Blog, you see some articles that address immediate problems and concerns, and there are others that address situations that come up year after year. It's these articles that we have reformatted as PDF files and placed them on the Skills Iowa Web Page for you to download and use.

Check it out.

Formative Assessment

This blog has been going for a while now, and some of the earlier posts are sort of buried. From time to time, we'll bring one or more of them up for your viewing.

Click here for a post about formative assessment.

Assessment Center Reports

Assessment Center has six reports available to teachers. Each of them is useful in a different way, and each raises and answers different questions about the same data.

The first report listed is the Assessment Results report. This report gives the scores on a single assessment, breaks the scores down into the four performance groups, gives the ability to drill down to see a single student's assessment, and shows the performance data on each tested skill. This report gives a quick look at what we just did, and allows us to make decisions quickly about the tested skills.

The next report in the list is a Compare Assessments report. This report will allow you to show a comparison of how many students performed in a given performance group or groups in selected assessments as well as showing the entire distribution of total scores on a single assessment. For example, if you were interested in showing how many students had scored in the top two proficiency groupings on two assessments, you would merely click the Meets Standards and Exceeds Standards buttons above the list of assessments on this report page. Next, you would click the assessments you want to compare. Your report will show the newest assessment on the left. You may want to run this report more than once using different choices of performance groups to show the entire picture.

The third report is called the Question Details report. This report provides an item analysis of the assessment. With this, you get the ability to see not only which skill caused your students problems, but also which question or questions caused students problems. Any incorrect answer displays the incorrect choice. The correct answers are shown by a + sign. At the bottom of the columns is a series of buttons with the letter "I" displayed. These icons will allow the teacher to see which skill was tested by this question. To see the skill, just let your cursor hover over the appropriate icon.

The fourth report is called the Overall Skill Performance report. This report allows the teacher to see how a student has scored on all tests given and taken in a given subject area. The selection of ELA, Language Arts or Math must be made when building this report. The teacher must also choose from a list of Assessment Types. If the teacher is evaluating assessments that he/she has created, he/she should choose Teacher Created. If one is looking at the performance on the benchmark assessments, you would choose Administrator Created. The resulting report shows a multicolored performance bar graph. Clicking on each of these bars will show the grouping of students on each of the tested skills in all of the assessments used so far in this class. This aggregate report gives a look at how students have done on a series of assessments. This report is not available immediately after taking the assessment. It will be available within 24 hours.

The fifth report in the list is called Overall Student Performance report. This report does essentially the same thing as the Overall Skill Performance report except it does it for one student at a time. It is a good way to look at how one student is doing on multiple skills over the course of all of the assessments taken in a class. This report is also not available until 24 hours after the last assessment has been taken.

The final report is called the Student Performance report. This report gives a detailed report for a single student over any assessments the teacher chooses. It offers the opportunity to see how any student has performed on all skills tested in this class.

All of the Skills Iowa reports are easy to generate and use. Each of them has its own purpose and each of them displays a different view of the data generated by the assessments. This is the Analyze part of our Assess, Analyze, Act process. If one uses the data generated in these assessments to inform the instruction in this class, student achievement can be raised substantially.

Take a look at the reports over your assessments. They are great diagnostic tools. If you need help, contact your project leader.