Using Data To Guide Learning
As soon as a student has completed an assessment you can view data instantly by signing in to your Class Administrator account. You will be able to guide your decision making by answer important questions:
- Which of my students are at-risk for school failure (universal screening)?
- What are my instructional groups?
- How can I differentiate my instruction for each student (Diagnostic & Test Question Analysis)?
- Are my students making expected progress?
Universal Screening
Upon signing in to your account you will see your students' scale scores for Common Core math. You can use the buttons in the left column to switch to Reading. You can also use these buttons to select specific domains of the Common Core. In the screen below you can see the 23 students for this grade three class sorted by scale score. The three students in red at the bottom of the screen have been identified as at-risk for school failure in math. These students are below the cut-score that defines a score as at-risk. The three students in yellow have scores that have been identified as borderline. The scores that are blue are on grade level and the students in green are above grade level. The cut-scores for these categories are defined by your school administrator.
Instructional Groups
These same categories, at-risk, borderline, on grade level and above grade level can be used to inform your instructional groupings. For small group instruction you can organize your groups based on the color of their scale score. These scores and groupings will be different for each Common Core subject and domain. If you are planning an instructional block for Geometry you can click that button in the left column to see the scores and groups for the Geometry domain. The colors are guideposts for your groupings. In the below example you may decide to group the red and yellow students together given the proximity of their scores. Or you may decide to group the students with green scores in two separate groups.
Differentiating Instruction
There are two data analysis techniques to apply to Track My Progress data in order to differentiate instruction for your students. The first is by using the diagnostic feature of Track My Progress to see your students' overall strengths and weaknesses. The second technique is test question analysis which provides you with a very concrete view of what your students do or do not understand for each Common Core domain.
Diagnostic
Click the Diagnostic button at the top left of your scree, below the Track My Progress logo. The changes your data view from instructional groupings and universal screening to a diagnostic view of student strengths and weaknesses. The default view represents the overall strengths and weaknesses for your entire class defined by Common Core subjects and domains. Generally, for medium to large classes, you will not see major differences between the Math domains or between the Reading domains like you might for an individual student. If you do see a domain for your overall class that is markedly lower that the other domains for that subject then this is indicating a specific weakness for your class relative to the national average. This may indicate a gap in curriculum for the current or previous years.
You can see the diagnostic strengths and weaknesses for an individual student by clicking their name from list in the left column. Here you will find more variability between domain scores than you probably saw for the entire class. Some students may have relatively balanced scores which do not indicate relative strengths or weaknesses. With other students you are likely to some very specific relative weaknesses and strengths.
The diagnostic scores represented in the below graph indicate a profile that is generally on grade level. However, the overall math score is borderline. The diagnostic profile reveals that Common Core Measurement is the specific domain that may be undermining overall math performance with Common Core Base Ten as a secondary weakness. Differentiating instruction for this student could focus on supplemental instruction in Measurement and Base Ten concepts.
Test Question Analysis
Track My Progress is a transparent assessment, which means that you can drill into your data to see the test questions your students worked on including the answers that they provided. This helps make the bridge from the abstract scale scores to the concrete reality of the kinds of problems your students can and can not handle. To see more information on the specific domain performance of a student follow these steps:
- When viewing the diagnostic graph for a student click the lowest domain score.
- This will bring you to a vertical bar graph that shows the student's performance in this domain for all available test dates.
- Click on the most recent vertical bar to see a list of test questions the student saw for the domain in question.
The above screen represents the five Measurement and Data questions the student was tested on. The table indicates the standard for each test question as well as the difficulty level, time to complete the question and whether the student answered the question correctly, incorrectly or skipped the question.
- Place your cursor on the standard to see a definition of what the test question is designed to measure.
- Click on the row to see the actual test question.
The test question view allows you to see exactly what concepts or problems did and did not challenge the student. You can click See Student Answer to see how the student answered the question. This gives you a window into their thinking and the nature of their misunderstanding of the concept. You can use the blue arrow at the top center of the screen to page through each of the questions to get a better sense of what level is best for instructing this student for this domain.