| State: New Jersey | Number of Students: 1,368 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: N/A |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: N/A |
School Context
This is a highly influential charter school network of schools that supports schools across multiple states. They focus on developing a personalized learning model that utilizes adaptive playlists and student agency. They have also built their own learning management system and consult with other organizations to adopt their model across the country.
State of Technology
This charter management organization is looking for a solution to better track and assess students in their mastery-based curriculum. They are looking for an innovative replacement to their assessment tool in order to create new assessments, deliver them, and analyze them more efficiently and with more ease. They continue to believe that students should have a mastery-based education where they have the opportunity to have several opportunities to demonstrate mastery of a standard.
Currently, the network uses Illuminate DnA to create and deliver assessments. The tool does not integrate with their in-house created SIS/LMS. They would like to replace Illuminate with an assessment tool that has a better user interface and that integrates with their customized SIS/LMS. Additionally, while they are able to create assessments in Illuminate, it is difficult and the user experience could be better.
Tech Needs & Requirements
This network of schools implemented a mastery-based curriculum and have a combination of formal and informal assessment cycles that mirror their learning schedule. They would like a tool that could handle formative, benchmark, and end of year assessments. They would also like the tool to satisfy several ideal features.Content writers will be largely responsible for creating in-common, standards-based benchmark assessments. They will create, but teachers will assign. Occasionally, teacher would like to be able to create their own assessments, especially in the case where a students needs multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery.For example, if teachers wanted to quickly generate a 4-5 question assessment to test a particular standard, they could.If they could draw from nationally normed item banks (like NWEA, etc.), that would be ideal. Additionally, they would like to be able to create questions that have a variety of ways to answer, including but not limited to multiple choice, open response, constructed response (text-based questions), true/false, compare and contrast, and any TEI questions would be a really nice to have.If there was a way for students to get some feedback on how they did on an assessment, that would be a nice to have. They should get some breakdown or recommendation on areas for improvement. This network of schools has an in-house built SIS/LMS and this tool should have API/LTI integration if possible. Data will be incredibly important to teachers and administrators to have access to data. See data section below for types of data they would like to look at.
Students will be able to take assessments often, be able to be tested in a standard multiple times.
Teachers will administer and assign assessments. They will occasionally create their own formative assessments within the tool. They will analyze data to inform instruction and intervention.
The tool must be able to integrate with their custom LMS via LTI. The tool must accommodate multiple standards such as CCSS, NGSS, New Jersey Standards in Science and Social Studies, Michigan Standards. The vendors must provide excellent customer service and use train-the-trainer method of training, if needed. The tool must provide access to nationally-normed question banks (they are willing to pay for this). The tool must be able to accommodate mastery-based assessment. The tool must also provide data reporting for student progress toward mastery. The network provides Chromebooks and MacBook Air laptops. Reports on student progress is essential. Teachers would like to also view the actual percentage that students earned on the assessment and the questions students got wrong. They would like the teachers to be able to dig deeper into the data to determine why students might have gotten something incorrect. Additionally, they would like to see students' time on task. Other reports desired are group data (by class), strand data (domains) and by student. For administrators, they want to see full mastery rate and potentially how many times are students taking an assessment. Also, they would like to be able to pull data on total time students are taking an exam. They would also like overall usage data by class, by teacher, and by student. The tool must provide Google single sign on and integrate with custom LMS/LTI Powerschool.