Today the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education agreed to adopt the Common Core Standards for state standardized testing. In a 9-0 vote, Massachusetts became the 28th state in the U.S. to approve the new national standard and another 12 should follow suite by the Fall. In a couple of years the MCAS exam [...]
Earlier this week the New York Times ran an eye-opening article about students from the Beacon School of Excellence in Brooklyn. Despite their poverty these young fourth graders scored higher on their standardized tests than students in neighboring schools with more resources and affluent backgrounds. This is not a story about underdogs and rich versus [...]
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of ACT Test Diagnostic Assessments and Reports for tutoring centers. Students and tutors who use traditional books, paper / pencil to practice and prepare for the ACT exam can now get the best of two worlds. Work with traditional printed books like Real ACT Test Prep Guide [...]
UPDATE: There is an online version of this tool available for free at Bubblesheetgrader.com Tutors who teach ACT exam prep and Students who are preparing for the ACT exam, feel the pain of ACT test grading, scoring, and scaling. The process requires reasonable manual effort which is prone to error, and is time away from [...]
In addition to the many other methods of conducting test sessions or importing student responses, Socrato now allows tutors and teachers to directly initiate a test session as one of their students. The responses can be entered question by question, or in “bubble sheet” mode. For large classes, tutors can still import from excel files, [...]
A good article by Bailey on how to leverage MCAS material to supplement classroom or home instruction. Teachers and tutors can leverage any state standardized test material, or even National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) material. After each assessment, NAEP releases dozens of sample questions to the public—more than 2,000 questions are currently available to [...]
How Data analysis is helping raise performance – story covers both good and the bad Data-Driven Schools See Rising Scores – WSJ.com Educational data is in abundance – but not in very useful state. Education Week: Data, Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Use Impact of providing detailed and real time access to student [...]
With the MCAS season underway and teachers trying to help students, we received a few requests to get insight into how the questions are distributed across the learning standards. Or, how many questions are allocated to each standard area in a given year or grade level? Or, Do you have the frequency analysis of questions [...]
In an interesting article from Dr. Mostafa Mehrabani – McGraw Hill Assessment and Reporting President, he shares his thoughts about the future of educational assessment and reporting. Looking at the trends, I believe the underlying shift in education (and the impact of technology on it) is going to be bigger than Dr. Mostafa’s article projects. [...]
