Collecting and Analyzing Common Assessment Data

While most teachers recognize the value of analyzing assessment data they often struggle with collecting the data. It is not sufficient to know how many questions each student answered correctly or how many students passed and failed. While collecting assessment data is possible without technology its use allows the collection and reporting of assessment data in a timely and user-friendly way. Software programs that use a browser and the Internet (web-based) to collect and report assessment data tend to more user-friendly and are designed with the teacher in mind. These programs allow students to take an assessment on a scan form or online,  score the assessment, and report the results (data) almost instantly in a predefined format. Characteristics of such programs include:

1. Assessments that are aligned, by teachers, to state and/or local learning outcomes and graded automatically.
2. Automatic multiple choice and performance based assessment grading.
3. Access to immediate, actionable achievement information that teachers and administrators can use to adjust curriculum variables and improve student outcomes.
4. Access to immediate and actionable student performance data so teachers can design and deliver appropriate student intervention and enrichment programs.
5. Access to disaggregated and aggregated data by any level (student, teacher, course, section, grade, school and district)
6. Reporting achievement by any student demographic group (including ethnic, IEP, ESL, Free and Reduced Lunch, etc.)
7. Access to trend, comparative and progress reports by student subgroups, teachers, courses and learning standards.
8. Complete visibility of learning objective mastery, through simplified reports that make it easy to know what students have or have not learned.

Representative of this group of programs is Mastery Manager by GoldStar Learning (www.masterymanager.com). The underlying premise of Mastery Manager is that assessments should be created by those closest to the learning, the team, and that the resulting data should be directly accessible to the team.

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Sam Ritchie

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Samuel Ritchie is a consultant with 35 years of experience as a practitioner. For most of those years, he was the director of technology at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Illinois.

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