Benchmarks

The first math benchmark test and the September reading benchmark tests are now active. They will expire on October 1st, so if you have not already made your plans to administer them, it's time to do it.

A couple of things that you should keep in mind:

1. Students must turn off the pop up blockers for the test code to allow access to the test.

2. Your classes must be aligned to ELA for the reading benchmark test to be accessible and to the math alignment to make the math benchmark show up. You can check this by clicking on the class details tab. Your alignments will appear at the top of this page; if you need to change them, you can click on edit and change your alignments.

3. Students do not have to finish a benchmark in one sitting, but they will have to reenter the test code to resume testing.

4. If a student is unable to access the test, you should try entering the code for him/her. If that doesn't work, you should try on a different computer that you know another student has been able to use successfully.

5. The test codes are sent to your building principal monthly, but they are always available on our website by using the "Benchmarks" button. You can also find this information by clicking on the "Assessments" tab in Assessment Center. Look under the Test Code column in the assessment listing.

The benchmark tests are a good initial measurement of student achievement. The earlier you administer them, the more they measure the student's incoming knowledge. We hope you find these useful tools to help you make educational decisions.

Have a question?

There's a lot of good stuff at Skills Iowa's website, www.skillsiowa.org. One new feature is in the FAQ's area. If you scroll to the bottom of that page, you will find a place to submit your own question. Your question will be sent to all of our staff who will then have the ability to respond to your problem.

We hope you will use the FAQs and that you will submit your questions. Of course, we also encourage you to contact your project leader with your questions. You can find their contact information in the Skills Iowa Staff section.

Part of a team?

If you are part of a collaborative team, Skills Iowa's programs are a good fit for you. Both programs offer you the ability to work collaboratively.

Assessment Center assessments can be shared with all of your staff, and can be made searchable so all teachers teaching the same subjects could administer the same assessment. Another feature of Assessment Center is the ability to add one or more teachers to your class. This way a cooperating teacher has the same access to data that the lead teacher has. The reports, the heart of Assessment Center, are another way to collaborate. If you have all given the same or a similar assessment, taking the performance data to a collaborative meeting will help provide the focus that your team needs to plan the next step in your teaching plan.

Skills Tutor has new features this year that allow the sharing of assignments not only between your sections, but also within your school. If your team wants to insure that everyone has assigned the exact same lessons, this is an easy way to make that happen. To set up this sharing, check out the Advanced Assignment Options button in Skills Tutor.

If you are a single section school, another way to make collaboration work is to compare your results on the benchmark assessments with those of the other Skills Iowa schools who have taken the same assessment. A teacher in a neighboring school who is finding success could be a great resource, and the communication between schools is a way that both districts can benefit.

Skills Iowa data is a useful way for you to highlight those areas where your students are finding success and those areas where they struggle. Planning the strategy to address the information the data shows you can help you increase student achievement.

Something to consider...

If you have assessments in your account that you created last year, you may want to edit them to give you more options.

Over the summer, our bank of questions was realigned to more closely match the Iowa Essential Concepts and Skills In Math and Literacy. While what you created and used last year was aligned to the Iowa Core, there may now be skills you couldn't find last year or more questions on those skills this year.

To edit an assessment, log in to the class you want to work in. Once you are in, click on the Assessments tab. Select the assessment you want to edit and then click the edit button at the upper part of the page. You will now be able to go through the assessment and check for additional available items. If you created the assessment using the Reading Curriculum standard, or the Iowa Grade Level Indicators in Math or Reading you should find more items available this year. You may also find completely new skills in the math alignment that were not there last year.

Give it a look, and if you need help, contact your project leader.

Welcome Back!

Some of you are in year-round school, and some of you are just thinking about getting back to school for the 2010-11 school year. Either way, it's the beginning of the Skills Iowa school year.

You will find that you probably have the same username and password that you had last year, and some of you will find that you still have Assessment Center assessments in your account that you created last year and assignments you made in Skills Tutor. We encourage you to revisit these and make changes that are appropriate for the new year. Assessment Center has made more extensive alignment to the Iowa Core Curriculum, and there may be items that you want to add to your old assessment through the edit tab.

You will notice that both of our programs have a new look. It may seem completely different when you sign in, but you should quickly recognize your way around. The functions are more or less the same, but we have some new reports and new looks to old reports that we feel are real steps forward.

Your school will be receiving a packet of information soon that will be used in training if you are training early or which can be used right now if your Fall Refresher will come a few weeks after the beginning of school. In some cases, your school's new imports have already been made, in other cases, we are waiting for the data to be returned to us, and we will get your students in as soon as we can. If you find your students are already present in the correct grade for the new school year, there is no reason to wait for us; go right ahead and get started.

We're excited about the changes in our programs, and we are looking forward to sharing them with you, but most of all, we're excited to help you use the data from Assessment Center to help your students raise their achievement. Formative assessment works, and you can certainly use the tests you create in Assessment Center formatively and address the areas of concern with Skills Tutor as well as with many other strategies.

Welcome back! We're looking forward to seeing you.

Ending the Year and Summer Plans

As you end your school year, you may want to give some thought to the data you've collected. An easy for those of you who teach reading and who have given the reading benchmarks is to run a Compare Assessments report of each of the three genre of ELA (reading comprehension) assessments that you gave this year. We have found that teachers are not used to getting such data, and hopefully, the results will give you a pat on the back as you see the improvement in your students' scores through the school year. If you don't see this improvement, it is a great time to reflect on why the data doesn't show what you hoped for.

If there are individual students whose data should be retained for individual instructional needs next year, you should run the Student Performance report to select the assessments you want to report on.

The Skills Tutor data can also be useful, but be sure you know what the reports tell you. Since students can take these lessons over and over, you may want to run a Student Detail report to get the full picture on each student.

You may want to make some very large assignments in Skills Tutor for your students to challenge them to do more and to review what they have done. Let your kids know that these lessons will be available well into the summer.

Data is an objective way to evaluate not only a student's progress, but also a program's success. If we use it as a stepping stone to improvement, there is nothing to fear in data.

If you need help, contact your project leader. The data will be cleared out some time this summer, so please gather whatever you want to save before July 1st.

The Status of Assessments You Have Created

If you have assessments in your account that you have created, those tests will still be there next year as long as they have student data associated with them. If you have tests that you created that you have not used, those assessments will be deleted midsummer. IF you want those assessments to be retained, you must go in and enter answers for at least one student and grade that assessment.