| State: New Jersey | Number of Students: 1,909 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 35.9% |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: 1.8% |
School Context
This small district is seeking to raise the academic rigor in its schools. They serve a diverse population that is 40-50% are minority students.
State of Technology
After looking at PARCC results and the increasing demands for more rigorous instruction, the district needs a better solution to assess students in order to get actionable data back to teachers in as close to real time, so that they can inform instruction to help student achievement.
Currently, the district administers paper and pencil assessments. These are common benchmarks created by curriculum teams. They like that they can collaboratively create and administer these tests. However, since the teachers are in charge of scoring the assessments, there is too much room for bias and scaling grades.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They are looking for a digital assessment tool that can replace their current paper and pencil tests. They would like to administer diagnostics and benchmarks roughly 3-4 times a year. They will use these common assessments alongside teacher-created formative and unit-based assessments to help understand student progress and reflect on instructional rigor. Curriculum teams will create assessments using the tool. They would like the tool to create assessments tagged with the Common Core standards for New Jersey. The tool should have TEI questions along with multiple choice. If possible, the assessments should be modeled after the PARCC exam. Pre-created content would be a nice to have or able to upload assessments. If there were options for the assessments to be adaptive that would be a nice to have. If the tool were able to report on not only standards, but data on lexile level, etc. that would be a nice to have.
Students will take the assessments and the school would like the students to be able to see their progress reports from these assessments in order to facilitate thoughtful discussions and reflections on their learning.
Teachers will primarily be proctoring assessments and see questions prior to administering exams. They would like for teachers to have a handful of reports to inform instruction but not so much that they feel overwhelmed by the data. They would like the teachers to be able identify specific standards that students are struggling with in order to take action.
The tool must administer short cycle benchmarks and get actionable data. The tool content needs to be aligned to Common Core. The tool should make it easy to use reports. The tool must work on Chromebooks. The district offers Chromebooks 1:1. The data that this district would like access to includes: students' current status on their mastery of standards; progress toward goals; a comparative report that helps measure student growth; and flexible filtering. If possible, the district would like to be able to see where there are the greatest achievement gaps. If the tool could report on Lexile data, that would be a nice to have. If possible, the tool should be able to link student performance to their SIS data for student profile data like ethnicity and other sub-group data. Reports and data should be able export to CSV and PDF. The district preferred Google single sign on.