How will I and my students utilize the results of the assessment_sir joey.docx
- 1. How will I and my students utilize the results of the assessment How to Utilize Assessment Data in the Classroom An assessment is characterized as the process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to increase students’ learning and development. Through this process administers can gather assessment data to strategically plan and deliver individualized instruction. Teachers use assessment data as one of the most powerful tools in their classrooms. An important piece of teacher instruction comes from how they utilize this data. Data needs to be collected, evaluated, and then put to use through instruction and student interventions. Learning how to effectively use assessment data will impact student learning in the best way possible. How can technology help you access assessment data? Educational technology, like Istation’s Indicators of Progress (ISIP™), allows you to automate computer-adaptive testing (CAT) systems that automatically assign assessments to students. These types of assessment tools should have the following features to promote success: Monthly assessments are given the first time a student logs on during a calendar month. This is necessary to maintain a consistent stream of assessment data showing individual benchmarks for student progress.
- 2. On-demand assessments can be given at any time during the school year between monthly assessments. This feature provides a continuous progress monitoring tool that you can utilize to gather assessment data when needed. Assessment reports with actionable feedback. This allows your teachers to not only analyze assessment data for an individual student but also share the data with administrators for additional progress monitoring. Teachers can also utilize these reports to observe assessment data patterns and adjust instruction. 5 ways to utilize assessment data Once you’ve implemented an assessment tool that allows you to access the right assessment data, you can take the next steps in improving instruction in your classrooms. Read through our five ways to utilize assessment data to determine these next steps. 1. Plan individual instructional intervention Whether your school uses an MTSS or an RTI approach, the goal of delivering instructional intervention is the same: help students improve skills they struggle with. Assessment data gives teachers the foundation for creating their own individualized plan for struggling learners. Personalizing a student’s plan can look very different each time but may include a few similar criteria, such as... skills that need emphasis in the classroom; additional support strategies for teaching the student; and a way to track and monitor progress for the student, teacher, and families involved.
- 3. Keep in mind that a personalized instructional intervention plan remains flexible. Real-time reporting tools, like Istation’s personalized data profiles, provide formative assessment data and relevant statistics to guide instructional interventions delivered in the classroom. 2. Develop daily instructional strategies Knowing where each student is performing helps teachers see the big picture when developing their daily instructional strategies. This allows them to move from assessing students to grouping students based on relevant assessment data trends. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when it comes to grouping students and you may hear teachers ask: How many small groups should I teach? How am I going to find the time to meet with them? How do I manage the rest of my class while working with my small groups? Where do I find resources to meet all of the instructional needs of my students? Assessment data will provide you with everything you need to answer these questions and start grouping students. This data can help develop instructional strategies to meet the group’s needs. Many online reading and math assessments save teachers time by linking ready-to-use resources for small- or whole-group instruction within the assessment reports. 3. Determine targeted goals for students and teachers
- 4. Short- and long-term goals guide success for teachers and students. District and campus leaders can analyze assessment data and use the information to set goals for teachers that are specific, measurable, relevant, and attainable. In return, teachers can work to make sure that student goals are aligned. In a recent podcast, former educator and Istation professional development manager Julie Kalinowski said, “When students start taking ownership of their own goals and assessment data, that’s when we see the biggest bang for our buck.” 4. Monitor student and teacher progress Progress monitoring provides leaders with valuable information regarding improvements in critical reading and math skills as well as classroom performance. This type of monitoring should take place often so that it becomes expected and familiar for all parties involved. When conducting progress monitoring, consider using an all-in-one assessment tool for students. Having this type of assessment tool allows each student to be assessed in the area of content they need to show progress. When the tool adapts to the learner’s ability, the student becomes less discouraged and frustration levels are lowered. This ensures that the assessment data gathered during progress monitoring is more accurate. 5. Discover professional development gaps While many people believe that assessment data can only be utilized to help students improve, at Istation we are seeing another trend. Education leaders
- 5. are analyzing assessment data and determining where students are seeing the least amount of improvement. This information points them to the overall professional development gaps for teachers. Many leaders are looking for customized professional development sessions to fill these gaps. Educators are finding it easier to customize these development plans when they partner with their assessment technology provider. An assessment provider like Istation offers customized guidance and insight into proven educational approaches. They employ specialists with real-world instructional experience that can help create the customized professional development sessions your teachers need. To learn more about how Istation’s program and assessment tools can benefit your students and teachers click here. https://blog.istation.com/5-ways-to-utilize-assessment-data-in-the-classroom What teacher and student tools will be appropriate to collect such information? The Most Popular Digital Education Tools For Teachers And Learners Hundreds of digital education tools have been created with the purpose of giving autonomy to the student, improving the administration of academic processes, encouraging collaboration, and facilitating communication between teachers and learners. Here we present 11 of the most popular.
- 6. 1. Edmodo Edmodo is an educational tool that connects teachers and students, and is assimilated into a social network. In this one, teachers can create online collaborative groups, administer and provide educational materials, measure student performance, and communicate with parents, among other functions. Edmodo has more than 34 million users who connect to create a learning process that is more enriching, personalized, and aligned with the opportunities brought by technology and the digital environment. 2. Socrative Designed by a group of entrepreneurs and engineers passionate about education, Socrative is a system that allows teachers to create exercises or educational games which students can solve using mobile devices, whether smartphones, laptops, or tablets. Teachers can see the results of the activities and, depending on these, modify the subsequent lessons in order to make them more personalized. 3. Projeqt Projeqt is a tool that allows you to create multimedia presentations, with dynamic slides in which you can embed interactive maps, links, online quizzes, Twitter timelines, and videos, among other options. During a class session, teachers can share with students academic presentations which are visually adapted to different devices. 4. Thinglink Thinglink allows educators to create interactive images with music, sounds, texts, and photographs. These can be shared on other websites or on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Thinglink offers the possibility for teachers to create learning methodologies that awaken the curiosity of students through interactive content that can expand their knowledge.
- 7. 5. TED-Ed TED-Ed is an educational platform that allows creating educational lessons with the collaboration of teachers, students, animators—generally people who want to expand knowledge and good ideas. This website allows democratizing access to information, both for teachers and students. Here, people can have an active participation in the learning process of others. 6. cK-12 cK-12 is a website that seeks to reduce the cost of academic books for the K12 market in the United States and the world. To achieve its objective, this platform has an open source interface that allows creating and distributing educational material through the internet, which can be modified and contain videos, audios, and interactive exercises. It can also be printed and comply with the necessary editorial standards in each region. The books that are created in cK-12 can be adapted to the needs of any teacher or student. 7. ClassDojo ClassDojo is a tool to improve student behavior: teachers provide their students with instant feedback so that good disposition in class is 'rewarded' with points and students have a more receptive attitude towards the learning process. ClassDojo provides real-time notifications to students, like 'Well Done David!' and '+1', for working collaboratively. The information that is collected about student behavior can be shared later with parents and administrators through the web. 8. eduClipper This platform allows teachers and students to share and explore references and educational material. In eduClipper, you can collect information found on the internet and then share it with the members of previously created groups, which offers the possibility to manage more effectively the academic content found online, improve research techniques, and have a digital record of what students achieved during the course. Likewise, it provides the opportunity for teachers to
- 8. organize a virtual class with their students and create a portfolio where all the work carried out is stored. 9. Storybird Storybird aims to promote writing and reading skills in students through storytelling. In this tool, teachers can create interactive and artistic books online through a simple and easy to use interface. The stories created can be embedded in blogs, sent by email, and printed, among other options. In Storybird, teachers can also create projects with students, give constant feedback, and organize classes and grades. 10. Animoto Animoto is a digital tool that allows you to create high-quality videos in a short time and from any mobile device, inspiring students and helping improve academic lessons. The Animoto interface is friendly and practical, allowing teachers to create audiovisual content that adapts to educational needs. 11. Kahoot! Kahoot! is an educational platform that is based on games and questions. Through this tool, teachers can create questionnaires, discussions, or surveys that complement academic lessons. The material is projected in the classroom and questions are answered by students while playing and learning at the same time. Kahoot! promotes game-based learning, which increases student engagement and creates a dynamic, social, and fun educational environment. How will I utilize the results of the evaluation? HOW TO USE YOUR EVALUATION FINDINGS TO IMPROVE YOUR WORK Tweet Share on Facebook Share on Google+ Print
- 9. Suggest changes to this page Evaluating projects, programmes – or even the work of your whole organisation – can be a transformational step in making sure the work you do is effective and of the highest quality. Without a focus on improvement and learning, evaluation becomes a tick-box exercise; something that has to be done to please someone else. Used effectively, your findings can shape the work you do in the future and focus attention on how to achieve your intended outcomes and impact. In short, it can bring you closer to realising the change your organisation wants to see. 1 Share your learning with others While you may have guided the process from the beginning, this might be the first time other people involved with your organisation hear about your evaluation. Sharing your learning is an important part of the process – for transparency, accountability and so you can plan how to improve. Think about who needs to know about your evaluation. Not everyone involved with your organisation necessarily needs to know all your evaluation findings; what is useful to your trustees might not be what your volunteers want to hear about. Evaluations don’t always draw big crowds, so be creative – consider a lunchtime session for staff, a blog or short video for your supporters, or a paper summary for trustees. What do you want people to do with the information? This will change what you share, how you share it, and how people will respond. If you want people to engage with the findings – and take action – a more active workshop could be most effective. 2 Celebrate the positives If your findings show good news, celebrate! Recognise the achievements of staff, showcase the success stories of your organisation, and emphasise the way your work is making a difference. It could be a group email, a box of chocolates, a team pizza, or a pay reward; celebrate in whatever way makes sense to you, your team and organisation. Recognising and celebrating the positive findings isn’t just about making people feel good. Motivating your staff – and your volunteers – will make them more effective, more
- 10. engaged in the work, and less likely to leave your organisation. Read more about motivation and engagement in our recruiting and managing staff section. Sharing achievements with beneficiaries can motivate them too, and can contribute to further improved outcomes. 3 Make improvements to your work If your evaluation highlights areas where you can improve, don’t ignore them. Doing what you've always done, or sticking with what is safe, isn't going to make you the best organisation you can be – and it may not be what's most effective for your beneficiaries. Approach these discussions openly and with care: improvement is about learning, not blame. Evaluation findings could be used to: improve your existing services to maximise the likelihood that outcomes will occur. You might need to update the information you provide, change the content of your training or support provision, or revise your campaigning communications to supporters or policy makers. ensure you are reaching your intended beneficiaries. Consider whether the people or organisations you have worked with are those you had anticipated, or those who would benefit most from your work. If not, do you need to change anything about how you publicise your work, your eligible target group, or about the way in which you deliver your activities to make them more accessible? improve work with individual beneficiaries. Outcomes data can be useful for casework as well as looking at the effectiveness of whole services. If a beneficiary isn't achieving their desired outcomes, what could you both do differently? review your internal processes so you work effectively and in a way most likely to achieve outcomes. For example, you might look at your methods for training or supporting staff and volunteers, your relationships with partners or referring organisations, or at your project’s decision-making processes. When planning improvements to your work, make sure you consider how to make them manageable. When should you time your changes? Who'll need to approve and implement them? What resources are needed? Don’t forget to evaluate your monitoring and evaluation. Refine your monitoring processes so you are collecting useful data that will help you make future decisions and plan your work effectively. This may include looking at what IT you need to store and manage data.
- 11. 4 Use the findings in your planning processes Robust evidence is essential to making informed decisions about the future. Use your evaluation findings to inform your organisation’s planning. If you have a programme or organisational theory of change, this is a good moment to revisit it. Do your evaluation findings support the theory? Have your outputs led to the outcomes you had intended? Did your assumptions hold true? You may need to change the way you work. You might need to develop new ways of working to bring about your intended outcomes, or maybe your intended outcomes were unrealistic or not correct. If your theory turns out not to be accurate, understand why and consider changing it. Use your evaluation findings for organisational planning to help you. Prioritise activities most likely to lead to changes for your beneficiaries and allocate – or fundraise for – resources around these. Identify activities which are not leading to desired outcomes so you can stop or change them. Understand what level of intervention is needed to achieve the best outcomes for the largest number of beneficiaries. Some organisations find that they can reduce their level of intervention and still achieve their desired outcomes, thereby allowing them to work with more people or organisations. Identify any unmet need in your beneficiary group or potential new beneficiary groups. This might signal that you need to develop new services, programmes or campaigns, or that you need to try and encourage the development of additional services by other organisations. Assess context. Identify whether aspects of the environment in which you are working are affecting the outcomes you achieve. For example, if a lack of available rented property is hindering your ability to rehouse clients, you might need to campaign about this locally. Consider scaling up. Plan which elements of an initiative should be scaled up (if you're looking to grow) or could be replicated in other areas or by other organisations. Review staff skills and your organisation’s recruitment needs. Develop your organisational strategy and set appropriate priorities – read more in our strategy and planning section. 5
- 12. Establish an impact culture as a learning organisation Organisations are complex and the people inside them have different priorities, positions and perspectives. ‘We can improve’ can too easily be interpreted as ‘you’re not doing your job well enough’. Honesty and integrity are vital – but so is being sensitive. Building evaluation findings into your existing organisational processes, such as through appraisals and performance management, will make this easier. Make learning a key part of regular supervisions, collaborate with individuals from across different teams to help solve problems, or begin your organisational planning processes with an honest review. An impact culture starts with a shared set of values. From the very top, your organisation needs to commit to positively engaging with evaluation and encouraging individuals to reflect and change based on evidence. For a helpful guide on being a learning organisation – one that makes learning part of everyone’s daily job – see this Harvard Business Review article. This takes long-term commitment, time and patience. Further information This how-to was produced by NCVO, as part of a UK-wide collaborative programme supporting a focus on impact in the voluntary sector. NPC’s paper Data with destiny describes the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom model for organisational improvement. o It considers how monitoring data and evaluation information can be transformed into organisational knowledge and leadership wisdom. o Their full paper includes a number of case studies of organisations doing exactly this. How will I use the results of the pre-assessment? Pre-assessmentsare teststhatevaluate students’knowledge before instructionbegins,and,asKate Gasaway explainsinthispost,they’re valuabletoolswhenitcomestohelpingteachersplaninstruction, pacing,and contentneeds. Pre-assessments are tests designed to evaluate students’ understanding of material before teaching begins. A pre-assessment could cover content from prior grades, re-evaluate grade- level content from earlier in the year, or preview grade-level material. Pre-assessments generally serve two purposes: 1. To give educatorsa picture of theirstudents’needssotheycanbetterplanlessonstomeet those needs 2. To establishabaseline forstudents’growthforthe year
- 13. Because there is so much prior learning that could need to be assessed, comprehensive pre- assessments can be long and labor intensive for students and teachers. To make the pre- assessment process more manageable, some schools give them before each unit. Another—and I’d argue better—way to get valuable student data is to use a digital, adaptive assessment (like the i-Ready Diagnostic) and administer it two or three times per year. Regardless of strategy, there’s almost always a pre-assessment given at the very beginning of the school year. A 2019 survey showed that students’ first day of school could be as early as July 23 or as late as the day after Labor Day, which means your pre-assessment data could be more than two months old. Does this mean that, like a beach-themed bulletin board created in August (or July, I’m so sorry), your early data has outlived its usefulness? Absolutely not! A high-quality pre-assessment still has a lot of valuable information for you. So dust off that pile of tests—or whatever the digital equivalent of dusting them off is if they were administered online—and take a look at these four things they can still tell you. 1. How your yearly pacing is going so far Pacing was always a challenge for me in the classroom. Whether it was a fire drill, an unexpected field trip, or a wild bird set loose in the classroom, there was always something that threw off my lesson calendar. Over time, I got better at responding to these challenges with flexibility instead of saltiness. My department chair and I would go over my calendar and pacing in our mentoring meetings. We made and remade plans to fit my students’ needs while accommodating the almost funny number of classroomhiccups and interruptions that frustrate rookies but make veteran teachers laugh. I learned to stop worrying and love my calendar. Pre-assessments can help you anticipate how long your students need to learn specific topics, so you can confidently adjust your schedule no matter what wild card you’re dealt. Because your students’ needs will vary by topic, a pre-assessment that covers a wide range of topics will give you pertinent information when you start a unit that incorporates new prerequisite skills. Comparing your analysis of your classes’ pre-assessments with your current lesson calendar can eliminate some of the uncertainty in your planning and help you make strategic decisions. If You’re an i-Ready User Use the Yearly Pacing for Prerequisites and Alternate Pacing Guide on the Prerequisites report to help you make informed decisions about how to adjust your timeline. The i-
- 14. Ready Pacing Video Series has additional resources and recommendations. (Note: You’ll be prompted to log in to your i-Ready Central® account.) 2. What small groups to work with to address relevant unfinished learning One of the things that makes teaching math different from other subjects isn’t just how much students’ success depends on their earlier learning, but how many kinds of prior learning there are. The prerequisite skills students draw on can vary widely from unit to unit, and students’ proficiency and needs can vary just as much. For example, when I taught eighth grade, some students who excelled at solving equations algebraically struggled with geometric transformations, and vice versa. When we changed domains, I had to stay on my toes to make sure that I caught students who needed support, didn’t overlook students who had done well in earlier units, and recognized students’ new strengths. At this point in the year, you may be well into your second unit. Because you’re teaching new material, you’re going to have new groups of students with new kinds of unfinished learning to address. If you haven’t already done so, review your pre-assessment data with an eye toward the upcoming prerequisite skills students need to be successful. Make new small groups of students based on their shared needs. If you’re an i-Ready user, the Prerequisites report has groups like this for every unit based on the students’ Diagnostic Results. 3. Which whole class supports or interventions to use in upcoming classes It’s a blessing and a curse when an entire class shares the same misconception or incomplete learning. On the one hand, it means all your students are missing an important skill, and that probably has been frustrating for them. On the other hand, you’ve found a high-leverage opportunity to improve outcomes for all your students at the same time. Choosing the right time to tackle those concepts can make a dramatic difference for students—but when is that? As you get more familiar with your school’s standards, it gets easier to identify when you should incorporate lessons on prerequisite skills. You’ll start to see the connections between grades and standards and—like a bestselling mystery novelist adding clues to early chapters—you can start layering foreshadowing into your lessons. If you’re new to teaching, discuss this topic with
- 15. mentor teachers, coaches, and co-teachers. If you’re an i-Ready user, the Prerequisites report has whole class support options and suggestions for when to implement them for the best results. 4. How the topics in a unit connect to learning from earlier grades Some of my most eye-opening professional development experiences happened when our entire math department taught a small part of a lesson in the same domain and strand, starting with third grade and going through eighth grade. The perspective I gained made me see my students’ (and coworkers’) work with new appreciation and understanding. I still find it fascinating how early elementary school learning directly impacts students’ work years later. If you want to explore these kinds of connections, turn to your pre-assessments. Choose a relevant, high-leverage topic for your class, and explore its path through earlier grades and its extension through later grades. This approach takes what could be a daunting bit of personal professional development and breaks it into timely, bite-sized chunks. If you’re using Common Core State Standards, the Coherence Maps are a great place to start. If you’re an i-Ready user, check out the Learning Progression infographic on the Prerequisites report. Conclusion There you have it—four reasons why your beginning of year pre-assessment data is still useful. If you like what you read here, consider setting a calendar alert or adding a note to your planner so you remember to revisit your pre-assessments at strategic times, such as planning meetings, small group reorganization deadlines, and the week before you start a new unit. And if you do still have a beach-themed bulletin board up, maybe this is a good opportunity to remind students that the beach is a coastal biome, and as such, it experiences all four seasons . . . or maybe you just add a pumpkin to your display. Your choice.