The DEAN’s List

Greetings, Blogosphere!

Before becoming Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, I taught special education for 8 years in South Carolina. So, in addition to an interest in assessment and technology, kids with disabilities are near and dear to my heart. Today, Education Week shared this article about the results of a new study.  The study showed that test scores on state assessments for students with disabilities have increased in recent years. Part of this improvement may be because states may be offering alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS) intended for students with milder disabilities and are definitely implementing alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) for students with the most significant disabilities. Though these accountability tests may not be perfect, they are an appropriate option for many students with disabilities for whom standardized tests taken with or without accommodations may not yield valid scores. (If you’re interested in information about Alternate Assessments, check out NCEO’s website.)

So, let’s celebrate for a moment that progress is being made to improve the large-scale assessment options for students with disabilities. Hopefully as the field learns more about Universal Design and accessibility, there will be greater improvements!

Until next time!
Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!

One of the things I do as your friendly assessment nerd is train teachers on using the information from Discovery Education Assessment’s reports to improve instruction. I usually start by telling them places to get support and ways to join the community of folks who use Discovery Education. Well, a crew of fabulous technology coordinators in Collinsville. IL asked that I post links. So, FYI:

When you log on to Discovery Education, look on the right side of the screen for “My Services.”  Make sure you see Discovery Educator Network (DEN):

If you do not, go to http://community.discoveryeducation.com

From now on, when you log in, you’ll have a quick link to the DEN!

Now, here are some other places we discuss:

• http://www.twitter.com/den
• http://delicious.com/discoveryea
• http://www.facebook.com/discoveryeducationassessment

So, there’s some things to keep you busy for a while! Connect with us and let’s get to sharing

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Assessment is everywhere!

This weekend, I visited one of my best friends in Springfield, IL. On Sunday before my return flight home, I decided to buy a magazine to entertain myself on my flight. Although I do read a lot about education, technology, and assessment, sometimes I like to read about things that are not work related. So, I bought the September 2009 issue of Family Circle.

On the cover, new slow cooker recipes, 45 ways to save $, and 40+ pages of “home sweet home” ideas are promised. There’s also a section on back to school. I don’t have any school-age children, so I wasn’t so excited about the style trends for kids as I was the great tech buys promised. Well, would you believe right smack in the middle of my magazine there is a four page article “Testing 123: Everything you need to know about SATs, ACTs, APs and more. Pencils down!”? I just can’t get away from assessment nerdery!

One of the things that I found interesting was the article points out that test-prep for these tests is important to help students become familiar with the directions and format. David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) says that there are large studies that show that for the SAT most students’ score increase only about 30 points overall after test prep. For the ACT, he says a recent study showed scores increased about half a point after test prep. Here’s what I think is really interesting about these numbers… the increases are tiny! Why???? I know why! Testing for the sake of testing does not improve student performance. Without quality instruction on what is being tested, students just won’t make marked improvements. This applies to most anything, I think! We must assess with a purpose… to inform instruction. Then we must use those results to plan and adjust what we are doing. That’s when we’ll see increases in student performance.

On an unrelated note, I also learned in this magazine that eating a cup and a half of blueberries a day can reduce belly fat by up to 12%. I suppose that means by themselves and not in muffins. Oh well!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!

One of the benefits of joining the DEN is that you get access to several Builder Tools that you can use with Discovery Education Streaming.

One of those tools that I’ve been playing with this week is Quiz Builder. Quiz Builder allows you to create quizzes that have multiple choice, short answer, and true/false type questions. The really cool thing is that you can add DEstreaming videos for the quiz as a whole and/or for individual items. You can also add videos that show up in the report when a student misses the question.

Check out this quiz I built on the human body.  Be sure to miss a few items for fun.

Until next time,
Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!
Did you know that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) have joined, along with a number of other agencies to initiate a state-led process of developing (and adopting) a common core of state standards? Forty-six states plus the DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have signed on to take part in The Common Core State Standards Initiative.

I knew this was underway, but imagine my surprise when Education Week reported that drafts had been released this week!

Well, here they are for your viewing pleasure:
Preamble
Standards for Reading, Writing, and Communication
Mathematics

Check ‘em out. What do you think?

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!

A classmate in my Differentiating Instruction course shared a cool link today and I thought I’d pass it along to you.

Laura Cawley says,  using Jeopardy

“is a great way to prepare for a test or project, and get the students involved. It allows for several different categories, and the opportunity to work as individuals or groups. It is a very basic game, so not difficult to create. It also gives opportunity to be challenging.”

The website features a number of Jeopardy game boards that were created in PowerPoint by teachers and is organized by topic and grade. There is even a link at the bottom of the page to create your own!

EDIT: Thanks to Robin (see comment below) for another resource for making your own Jeopardy game at Jeopardy Labs.

So, have some fun reviewing for tests or quizzes with your students!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!

If you’ve been around the DEN any at all, you’ve probably seen that Discovery Education and Wilkes University launched an online master’s degree program in instructional media last year. Well, not only am I an assessment nerd, I happen to be a bit of a geek (which explains why I am blogging!) So, I’ve been checking out some of the courses. This session, I am taking the course in assessment. For me, this is a fun course since I am getting to see classmates get excited about using formative assessment to drive instruction. I am also taking the course on differentiating instruction. (btw, I spell it differientiating  EVERY single time and spell checker saves me!) Now that I’ve confessed my inability to spell it, let me ask… do you know what differentiating instruction means?

In 2007, ISTE published Differentiating Instruction with Technology in K-5 Classrooms by Grace E. Smith and Stephanie Throne. I mention their names because not only did they write the textbook, but they also wrote the course and are teaching it this session! They explain in the text,

“Differentiated instruction focuses on teaching strategies that give diverse students multiple options for taking in and processing information, making sense of ideas, and expressing learning.”

Is it possible to give diverse students multiple options without assessment? I vote no. To differentiate by interest, teachers must assess student interest. This may be done through informal observations, interviews, or surveys. But, all of these are a type of assessment. In my experience as a special educator, I frequently used assessment to differentiate instruction by need. Typically, I’d use some sort of curriculum-based measure to determine students’ performance in reading fluency, comprehension, written expression, mathematics computation and reasoning. Using assessment tools, I was able to temporarily group students for specific lessons or units based on their needs. These freed up a lot of time and prevented a lot of behavior problems since students were working on appropriate assignments and frustration/boredom was minimized.

Using assessment tools, teachers can determine what students are interested in, their learning style, and what skills they need help on. This allows teachers to make decisions about what to teach and how to deliver the instruction to provide students the best opportunity to learn. That’s what differentiating instruction is all about!

Until next time!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Greetings Blogosphere!

I hear teachers talk a lot about a lack of time, so I’m always looking for short cuts to share. So, here are 4 cool tools to use to save time at figuring out what your students know and can do.

1. Rubistar is a free online rubric builder. You select the topic and dimensions and Rubistar does the rest. You can save them on Rubistar, or copy and paste into a document to keep for later.
2. EasyTestMaker is a free online test generator to help you create your tests. You can create multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer and true and false questions all on the same test. You can also insert instructions and divide your test into multiple sections.
3. iQuiz Maker is an easy way for you to create custom quizzes for the iQuiz game for the iPod. (Yes, for iPods!)
4. Discovery Education™ Quiz Builder allows you to incorporate video clips into interactive quizzes.You probably need to belong to the Discovery Educator Network for access, but membership is free and it will connect you with loads of other teachers… so go ahead sign up and tell ‘em you read about it on the Assessment blog.

Anybody have any experience with any of these you’d like to share? Please add that to the comments. I’ll be adding new tools in future posts, so if you have an idea be sure to share it.

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd,

Porter

Greetings Blogoshphere!

This afternoon (Monday) I’ll be hosting a webinar that provides an overview of Discovery Education Assessment’s Predictive Benchmarks. If any of you are available at 1pm EDT and are interested, here’s some information:

Match, predict and improve student performance on state exams with Discovery Education Assessment: Predictive Benchmark. A powerful formative assessment resource, Predictive Benchmark generates a clear, accurate picture of every student’s progress toward state-mandated educational goals. This webinar will provide you with an overview of Predictive Benchmark, an incredible resource that has been shown to predict performance on state exams with up to 90% accuracy.

Follow this link to register: https://discoveryed.webex.com/discoveryed/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=556448329

If you can’t attend this session, I do these at least once a month

Porter, Your Friendly Assessment Nerd