Of course, there is no way to tell how well student will perform on test day, but there are predictors you can lean on to take away most of the guesswork. In this article, I will share with you a few tactics on how to use learning analytics to determine if the SAT or the ACT is right for your student.

1.       Utilize Pre-SAT and Pre-ACT Tests

Before you make your student take an ACT or SAT practice test to determine which test is right for them, delve into what data sources the student already accrued.

You may want to investigate if they have PSAT and PLAN scores that you can derive meaning from. You could potentially save hours of practice test-taking time if you can determine (from these already existing pre-ACT and pre-SAT scores) which test the student appears to perform better on.

2.       Derive Actionable Items from Practice Tests

Using learning analytics tutors can now get more granular in deciphering the results of SAT and ACT practice tests which can help them choose between the ACT vs SAT. The best way to do this is to use data from practice tests (such as the data provided to users of Socrato software) to create a lesson plan targeted at testing pain points.

Students that study alone and without tutoring help often focus on improving areas that they feel they are better at rather than target the areas where they need the most assistance. Using learning analytics, tutors should be able to deduce an action plan which focuses on strengthening their student’s “flabby” test answers, just like a personal trainer would use a physical to determine what areas a trainer needed to beef up on.

3.     Give Confidence to Parents and Students

Though the ACT continues to grow in popularity as an alternative for the SAT, many students might be guided by the wrong reasons to try to choose the SAT over the ACT (or vice versa).

Despite the fact that the ACT is now accepted by all colleges and universities as well as the SAT, you may have to do a little convincing to show the parent (and the student) the reasoning behind why you believe they should focus on one test over the other. After all, for many years the ACT was only offered in the Midwest and the SAT was popular with East and West Coast schools. Who knows? A Parents might side with one test because its the one they are most familiar with. A student might want to take the SAT because that’s the one her friends are taking. It’s important to cut through these personal preferences and use data to give them confidence in your test plan for the student.

SAT vs ACT: Choosing the Right Test [NEW EBOOK]

Download this free 20-Page Ebook for Tutors Now!

Our free 20-page ebook is a step-by-step guide on how to select the right test for your student. Learn everything you need to know about using the PLAN and PSAT to improve student scores, how to leverage learning analytics to select one test over the other, and other tips on how to take the guesswork out of selecting the ACT vs the SAT.

Before you ask yourself “What went wrong?” read the following blog post. It’s a Facebook guide for tutors and it may just help you turn your Facebook page from a lifeless desert into a hub that your fans love to interact with.

To get started engaging your Facebook fans, here are common mistakes I see tutoring companies make on Facebook and some action items on how to fix them.

Mistake # 1: Your Business has Friends, not Fans, on Facebook.

“What’s so wrong about asking to be someone’s friend on Facebook?” you may ask. There’s nothing wrong with being friends with people on Facebook if you’re a person with their own private account and network of friends. However, your business should not have friends, it should have fans who have liked your business on Facebook. Brand personalities (Celebrities) and businesses such as tutoring companies should maintain their presence on Facebook through a business page; it comes with a different suite of tools than a Facebook friend account and is geared to help businesses. For one, if you have a Facebook Page, fans can “like” your page whenever they want instead of having to wait for a friend request to go through from you.

The Solution: Create a Facebook Page for your business using Facebook’s step-by-step Page creation guide. Start migrating your “friends” on Facebook and ask them to “Like” your business page. To sweeten the deal, you may want to offer the opportunity for any one who Likes your new Facebook page by X date has a chance to win an iPod touch or other attractive prize. You may want to also continue to use both pages in coordination with one another continually reminding people at various times during the next few weeks to “Like” your Facebook page and then provide a link. Moving forward, you’ll want to move all of your marketing efforts over to the Facebook page you created rather than the Facebook friend page you previously used. If Facebookers continue to add you as a friend on that account, send them a nice message asking them to “Like” your Facebook page instead to get updates.

Mistake # 2: You Forget to Write an Appealing Meta Description

When you share links on Facebook, does a captivating meta description of your blog post automatically get pulled into Facebook? If not, that’s probably because you’re not adding meta description to your blog posts or pages.

The Solution: If you’re using WordPress to blog, the answer to your problem is simple. Just download the All-in-One SEO pack plugin for WordPress and fill out the Title (should be the same as your blog title), Meta description, and Keywords. Your meta description should be less than 170 characters and enticing to your reader and make them want to click your link and read more. For those of you who are posting content to your website using some other service, speak to the web manager to talk about how to customize meta description on pages. Content creation services such as Drupal will have the option to add meta description when creating the page. Of course, if you’re not sure how to update it just Google “how to update meta description using (insert name of the content creation service you use)”

Mistake # 3: You Post Content Only During Work Hours.

If you’re only posting content to Facebook during your business work hours, then you’re missing out on connecting with a whole bevy of fans who may prefer to interact when they are at leisure.

The Solution: Experiment with posting at all manners of the day and try to customize your content to the type of user you’re trying to target. If you’re sharing a video, consider posting it after general work hours to see if you connect with your fans more when they’re more at liberty to listen and watch your video. If you have a new blog post you’d like to share, try to post it on the weekend  to see if you get any traction at that time. Don’t worry, if it doesn’t do well, you can always post it again mid-week to see if it procures more love. The important thing is that you’re experimenting.

Mistake #4 : Your Content Does Not Include Images.

To create a more eye-catching post on Facebook, you need to post links with images. Furthermore, if you don’t include a dedicated (related) image when you create the page you intend to link to, then Facebook will make suggestions on what images to add to your post – it will pull in anything: Twitter & Facebook share buttons on your blog post, images in the sidebar of your blog, etc. This can be a big problem if people want to share your link. They may scroll through the suggested images and add a photo of something having nothing to do with the blog post or its content which can be an eye-sore.

The Solution: If photos aren’t automatically populating when you post a link to Facebook, it’s probably because the page that you posted doesn’t include any images directly in the post. Facebook populates a link’s photos based on what photos appear on the page being to which the person is linking.

Mistake #5: You Don’t  Post Videos Directly into Facebook.

If you’re creating videos for your tutoring company, but you’re not embedding the video directly into Facebook, you may be missing out on an opportunity to get more eyeballs on your content. Facebookers typically don’t like to leave Facebook to enjoy a video. If they watch the video within Facebook, they are more likely to comment on the video within Facebook thus raising the videos affinity and popularity on the site. Ellie Mirman of HubSpot has some more information on increasing the power of Facebook content in 20 Tips to Get Your Content Seen on Facebook.

The Solution: If you embed a YouTube video link directly into Facebook, it will turn that video into a video playable within Facebook.

Though it’s also good to drive traffic back to your website, video is a different monster. Many people don’t like to click on a link to watch a video. They prefer what’s easiest. If you’d like to drive people back to your website after watching the video on Facebook, you should include a link to your video’s customized blog post or landing page in the video description on YouTube. Oh, and don’t forget to add a meta description and optimize your video for YouTube with a thumbnail and meta description, since that information gets pulled into Facebook, too.

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featured photo by rishibano

Free e-Book: 5 Tips to Improve Your Reporting for Standardized Test Reporting
Download this eBook from Socrato to learn how to optimize and improve your reports to help students improve their scores on standardize tests such as the SAT, ACT, LSAT or others.
Download the eBook >>

Despite obvious differences, the pressures and strategy involved in horse racing, remind me of some of the challenges students and teachers have while preparing a student for college. You could prepare a student for 6 to 8 weeks for a test, but just like with a horse on race day, you never know if that test preparation will pay off in the student’s final score. You can only prepare that student to the best of your (and their) abilities, cross your fingers and hope.

Fortunately for students who are in the college races, there is a way to help guide yourself across the finish line and into the college of your choice, even after the race is finished: Superscoring.

What is Superscoring? Why Superscore?

Some colleges allow students to superscore a student’s test results from tests that they’ve taken more than once. That means that if a student takes the SAT two times before applying to a college, they can submit both scores to the college and the college will take only the best scores from each section.

Let’s say a student “Johnny” studies for 6 to 8 weeks for the SAT and despite all that effort, really botches the critical reading section of their exam. His math scores are fantastic, however, which helps pull up his score, but not enough to stand a chance at the school of his choice. Tough luck, right? Well, maybe not. If “Johnny” takes the SAT again and does much better on the critical reading section, but his math score is still higher on his first test, he may be able to combine those results to create a Supertest score. It all depends on if the college he’s submitting his application toward superscores tests or not.

Superscoring is a Parachute not a Strategy

Here at Socrato we recommend that students looking to increase their college test scores work with a tutor to help diagnose if the ACT or the SAT is right for them. Using learning analytics, such as the analytics Socrato offers, tutors and students can now delve deeper into test results and identify strengths and weaknesses early on in the test preparation process so that students aren’t surprised on test day. We suggest taking on a test preparation regimen that focuses on 1 test (the ACT or SAT) for 6 to 8 weeks.

Superscoring should not be used as a strategy. Instead it should be used as a parachute in the event of a test-taking emergency. No student should strive to superscore their test results. However, in the event that the student performs under expectation in a certain area of a test, superscoring can be extremely helpful to give that student the leg-up that they need.

Before You Superscore, Read This

Ross Blankenship of Top Test Prep recently wrote a very helpful post on his blog called “Superscoring –3 Points to Consider.” I agree with Ross when he says that superscoring is a great band-aid for students who got sick before the test or had a bad night, but probably won’t help individuals who are already struggling to keep up with school work.

Also, not all colleges allow superscoring. Before retaking the SAT or ACT with the intent to superscore results, it’s important that a student look into the colleges they want to apply to and see what their policy is on superscoring. If the college prefers to accept only 1 uncombined score from 1 test, than it’s not likely that taking another test will be worth the preparation, money and time. Afterall, if the student is unwilling to work at improving the second score or if they have multiple demands at school which would be sacrificed for the sake of the second round of the test preparation process, I would strongly advise against Superscoring for the student.

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featured photo is from *raymond

Free e-Book: 5 Tips to Improve Your Reporting for Standardized Test Reporting
Download this eBook from Socrato to learn how to optimize and improve your reports to help students improve their scores on standardize tests such as the SAT, ACT, LSAT or others.

Download the eBook >>

Some of the changes you might notice -

• In certain situation during Online Take Test (especially for ACT tests), the answer choices were not showing up properly, that issue has been resolved.
• While printing tests and bubblesheets from library, question content was not printed correctly. This issue was impacting ACT tests and questions with images. This issue has been fixed.

Additional SAT tests rolled out -

• We now offer Scoring and Performance Reporting for additional SAT tests and custom SAT tests. These tests are in addition to one which are available from the Official SAT Guide. Please drop us an email if you want access to these.

As always we try to do as much testing as possible. If you encounter any issue, please feel free to reach out to us.

Also, majority of time students practice individual sections of tests. Few full length tests are completed in one sitting.

Continuing on our work on ACT Score calculator and Performance analysis we are starting the alpha testing of “section reports” for ACT and SAT tests. See the final output sample ACT Test Section Report, and SAT Test Section Report. Now compare is with full length SAT / ACT test report.

We believe this will help students and tutors to eliminate some of the cumbersome work give them more insight and time to focus their effort on real learning.

Using new features, Students and tutors who are using regular ACT books will be able to enter their question responses in a simple bubble sheet like web page. The basic flow will be:

• Select the book, test and section
• Enter the responses on bubble sheet
• Enter your name (optionally login)
• Get the scoring and the performance report.

Below are few screen shots and flow chart of what is about to come live in next few weeks.

If you are interested in trying out the Alpha Service please send us an email via our contact form and we will send you instruction how to access it.

Socrato Team

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

While working with a number of teachers and tutors, we noticed that many of them create their “binders” (a set of favorite questions, tests, and other materials such as reading passages) in real life, which they often share with others by photocopying. The binders contain a collection of their best material with lots of thought put in. We noticed a similar usage pattern in Socrato where many teachers collect their special questions and content, aligned with particular topic areas, or to help students with certain needs.

So taking a cue from Twitter, we just released features that allow a user (teacher or tutor) to follow other users (teachers and tutors). Whenever the “followed” user shares public material they have created, the “follower” will be notified. This way a teacher can assemble a content set, and all of their followers can reuse and collaborate on that material. Each individual user has privacy controls on how much of their profile and content is visible to other users.

Last night we released the “follow” feature in Socrato. Let us know what you think.

Mitchell D. Chester, Ed.D.
Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education

Dear Commissioner Chester,

I work with a number of schools helping them review MCAS data and results. Thank you for shortening the turnaround time for MCAS results for schools, and for shortening the test periods.  Schools will greatly benefit from the increased analysis and planning window you have created.  However, the new policy regarding the release of only a partial set of questions greatly impacts the ability of teachers and schools to review those MCAS results in a meaningful way.

Having a report showing only strand information puts teachers at a big disadvantage. It is very difficult without the actual questions to see where students are having difficulty.  For example, the strand information does not indicate whether a math question is a whisker plot, a line graph, or a stem and leaf plot; students may have done well on one but not another.

ELA questions are even more problematic. The strand indicators are almost meaningless (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc.) because they don’t tie back to student skills, such as “finding evidence”, or “making inferences” about the passages.  When the questions and answers are released and provided to the teachers, these interpretations can be made easily; without the questions, it is almost not worth looking at the English MCAS results.  While it is not necessary to release all the reading passages, the questions and answers are fundamental to proper analysis.

Being able to see the question and answer content also allows teachers to see which answers the students indicated, showing the answer response patterns of their classes.  Many times students choose the same wrong answer, showing that they misunderstand a concept in the same way.  For example, in math when calculating an expression with absolute value operations and squaring, a number of students might calculate the square correctly, but not get the proper sign.  Again, without access to the questions, this type of inference is impossible.

Release of test items is critical for teachers to conduct a meaningful analysis, and to help their students make real progress.  While it may allow for shortening the test period, and perhaps save money in a time of state budget scarcity, it is a big step backward for MCAS.

I am sure you have considered other options, but I implore you to look more carefully.  I am confident there are a set schools that would allow future questions to be field tested, perhaps in an interim assessment in November.  Such an approach could provide a win-win situation.  Schools who participate in the interim assessment program would get better information about student progress before the spring exams, and the entire community would benefit from the release of the common test items from the March and May assessments.

I urge you to support schools and teachers by reversing the new policy that limits the release of test items.

Warm regards,

Mike Oates

mfoates@gmail.com

User Interface

• More content  – In addition to grade 3 – 5 MCAS material, more content was added for grades 6 and 7.
• Easier access to content – Question search by grade level.
• Improved reporting - The Question distribution report now shows students’ points-data for open response questions.
• More stable upload of students’ assessment data.
• Fixed a number of issues for students TIA and roster data upload process. (e.g., information for one question was captured incorrectly and the session ID was getting lost).
• Fixed a number of other bugs.

Under the Hood

• Faster performance for take test area – With a number of schools now using Scorato in their school computer labs, we needed to make improvements so the system does not slow down. We made a good number of changes to how the take test is managed in the system. This will allow our servers to support a larger number of concurrent users.
• More stable and faster reports generation – We have completely revamped how the PDF files are generated for SAT diagnostic reports. With this change, the time required for report generation has dropped significantly. The current load calculation shows that the first report is available in about 10 -15 seconds, and subsequent reports are created in less than 5 seconds. These are complex reports, so this improvement constitutes a significant improvement compared the previous time lapse required to generate the reports. Pretty cool!

If you encounter any issues with these changes and improvements, please let us know.

Looking Forward

New and improved key features which are currently works in progress include:

• Additional reports which will allow teachers and principals to slice and dice their school’s and students’ data. They will be able to leverage these reports for instruction planning. This will allow them to automatically create custom and personalized assignments from Scorato. We are very excited about this.
• Making the delivery (printing and emailing) of all reports easier.

A big thank you goes out to all who have sent suggestions, requests and issues to us. We welcome your feedback and try to act on it in a timely fashion.

-Raju

Teachers who are tired of “cut and paste” can now go directly to our MCAS Question Search page, select the grade, select the strand standard, and we’ll provide a shopping list of questions fom which you can choose. If there are passages included, you can look at the passage detail with one click. Select the questions you like, put them in your QuestionCart, and create your own test. Print it for class assignments or assign it to students to practice online.

To teachers and school administrators, if you want learning data analysis for prior year “Test Item Analysis” from MCAS, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to give you custom demo or you can learn more on the Socrato website. We are working with a number of schools and tutoring centers and will be happy to share our work to see if we can be of help to you.

Issue Resolved

Increased testing effort on Safari browser
We have increased testing efforts on the Safari browser. We are finding a few issues and are making fixes to improve Socrato on Safari. There are certain issues, specifically “frozen” screens or dropdown selectors which are not working,  which we are hearing from you but we are not able to reproduce in our testing.

• Please let us know if you are having these issues so we can learn more about how to reproduce the problems.

Improved performance for assessment result upload with progress bar
A couple of you mentioned having issues with machine freezing while uploading of student scores. And refreshing of page was resulting in double data entry of the scores.

• Now when you do result upload, a progress indicator will appear to show the system is processing the student scores. In addition we have number of hidden changes which will eliminate duplicate upload.

Ability to delete or update previously uploaded session results
People were having difficulty in deleting or modifying the uploaded user data that was loaded in error

• We made it easy to edit and delete the entire upload if you uploaded the wrong data. There is a ‘Delete All’ button on Edit sessions page, or you can delete results student by student.
• In session list drop down there is a unique identifier (timestamp) for all your uploads that indicates when it was uploaded

Updated scoring calculation for Open Response question
The system was treating any data entry in open response question as correct, including a score of zero.

• Now if you assign points (greater than 0) to a question it will be marked as correct, while zero will be marked incorrect (instead of correct). All empty score will be considered as ungraded.
• In future we are considering adding the concept of partially correct. Let us know you would find this helpful.

Question Distribution report now shows Open Response Questions

• In the Question Distribution report you will get to see the open response and short description questions as part of report. Currently we are not proving the score distribution (it’s on high priority list)

Temporary workaround for Printing large passages (more work in progress – see below)
Few users are having issues printing large passage. It shows correctly on the computer screen but prints only partial information from certain browsers. We are able to reproduce the issue and have a temporary workaround.

• For long ELA passages current workaround is to print on Safari. It’s not perfect but does the job.
• To make global fix we will have to cut the passage images in smaller chunks to fit page size. It will take time because there are 143 passages. Please let us know any passage you want expedited and we will fix those first. We apologize about this oversight.

Printing Icon does not do anything on IE
In Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) when a user clicks on the print button, nothing happens and they get a javascript error.

• We are able to reproduce the issue on IE. We believe it is because the pop-up blocker is turned on. The fix for this is to either temporarily disable the pop-up blocker or add www.socrato.com to your “allow pop-up from this site” list.
• You can do that by going to Tools à pop-up blocker à turn off pop-up blocker

Please give us call if you want us to walk you through.

Some other changes have been done as well, including a lot more help has been added at places. Please let us know if there are particular places that are confusing and we will add more help in those areas as well.

Open Issues on Hot List

• Show some type of “Grouping Indicator” for question from same passage on Search Question page and Question List
• Large passage text not printing completely on paper, where as it is available online.
  • This will require few days of effort. If you have request for particular content set please let us know. We will fix those first.
• In certain circumstances the test heading and description are interchanging (showing incorrectly) on Test List page
  • We have seen this once, but never after that. If you are seeing this we would be very grateful if you contacted us so we can learn how to reproduce it.
• Printing issue – keeping questions and answers together on same page
  • We are looking onto this and it may take some time
• Content upload made easy – Questions upload for various types of questions from outside to Socrato. We have work in progress which will make this very easy. Please stay tuned.

Once again, thank you for your support and please feel free to reach out to me any time for any Socrato related question.
Best Regards,

Socrato Team