Session Goals
- Plan for student success on high stakes assessments
- Identify and access quality standards-aligned resources to facilitate student success
- Reflect on instructional practices
From day 1 – Begin at the beginning:
How prepared were students when they entered your classroom? For each student consider: content knowledge, proficiency, maturity support mechanisms, study skills, eager to learn (can make all the difference), work habits
How do we feel about high stakes assessments?
Comparison: Pros and Cons from the field
- Pro: Demonstrate knowledge; assess and identify learning deficiencies, overall school/district performance
- Con: Instructional time infringement, pressure, anxiety (for students and parents)
- One common focus: the child’s education
Disparity across the nation and within state and within district and within school with how we reach children; teaching is difficult and few look for ways we can help give support mechanisms to teachers and students: NCLB – No Child Left Behind (2002-2015) to ESSA - Every Student Succeeds Act (2015-present)
High Stakes Assessments do not end in the classroom – drivers license, real estate, financial advisor, teachers, etc.
What resources do you and your students use to reflect and support standards mastery?
Within EduSmart you can find standards-aligned assessments:
- Quizzes (make sure they are meeting the same rigor as the state expects) on line assessments give immediate feedback
- Tutorials – bridge gap in what students don’t know: Student Reviews (students monitor own progress on content understanding)
- Interactive Content Builder – the more interactive you can make vocabulary the more it sticks with the student. Wordexplorer – great visuals, game type environment (shows progress; build understanding of content)
- Informational Text – Readers (see and read content to make connections); respond to conceptual understanding with immediate feedback at end
- Monitoring Student Progress – students need to take ownership of their work; student can see progress on Student Dashboard (seen by student and can be seen by parents)
- Student Assignment Report – seen by teacher: can see exactly what questions were missed by student; more than multiple choice; short answer to explain their understanding
- Progress Monitoring Assessments – how to reflect on your instructional planning, do you need to revisit if entire class is not successful or move forward and only assign certain remedial concepts to specific students
Tools that provide immediate feedback help make our lives easier, especially digital tools. Facilitate success beyond your classroom with EduSmart’s data responsive content.
EduSmart is here to support educators and students through this journey. Here are some ways that our LMS helps you with the heavy lifting, so you can focus on what you do best – supporting and teaching students.
Use EduSmart to:
- Help your students practice for state testing
- Review standards and concepts with your students
- Build and understand context for scientific vocabulary
- Increase reading comprehension and reading stamina
- Drive student ownership over their learning
- Provide statistics for data-driven instruction
Standards-Aligned Quizzes
Perfect practice makes for perfect performance! All of our content is standards-aligned. That means that these assessments mimic the format and wording of your state's year-end exams, so you can be confident that you are providing the best preparation to your classroom.
There are two ways to administer these quizzes – you can either give them in person as a print out, or you can have students take these quizzes online to receive immediate feedback on their performance.
Student Reviews
These tutorials are perfect to either refresh concepts before taking assessments, or to reinforce weaker standards after taking practice tests.
Each review is broken up with questions to ensure that students are retaining the concepts just explained. Even if your student answers correctly, they will get an explanation of why the answer is correct.
Students get feedback on how they are performing on each concept, so they can understand which topics they need to focus on, and which concepts they have mastered.
WordExplorer
Vocabulary review becomes more engaging with WordExplorer! Assign your students a concept to review, and they can study the set’s vocabulary through games, pictures, fill-in-the-blank activities, and more!
WordExplorer is more than engaging; it continually provides feedback to your students as they progress through the cards, and supports struggling readers with rich visuals.
As students master each vocabulary term, WordExplorer tracks their progress by flipping over the completed terms.
Readers
Science Readers can help build your students’ reading stamina and work on their reading comprehension. Rich visuals and plentiful diagrams support struggling students by providing context to their text.
To ensure that your class is understanding the text they are encountering, there are reading assessments at the end of each section that provide immediate feedback.
Student Dashboard
Students can take ownership of their work by monitoring their progress on the Student Dashboard. They can see their completion progress on review assignments and how well they are scoring on each subject.
Parents can use their child’s dashboard to better understand the level of their child’s performance and how they can best support them.
As a teacher, you can view everything you students see, but with much more detail. See their responses, charts on their overall performance, class averages, and more.
Reporting Features
Anything to help teachers save time in their classroom-preparations is incredibly helpful. These reporting features help you monitor progress by showing how your groups are performing on assignments, assessments, and reviews.
By using the reporting tool you are able to focus your energy and time on the standards that your classroom needs the most help with, and you can track student progress to see improvements. You can focus on where individual students need assistance, or you can see what your entire class needs to review.