Assessments

ASSESSMENT IN OUR DISTRICT

Assessments in school serve multiple important purposes that help both students and educators. Here’s a clear breakdown of their role:

1. Measure Student Progress: Assessments allow teachers to track how well students are learning the material over time. They help identify areas where a student might need extra support or where they are excelling.
2. Guide Instruction: By analyzing assessment results, teachers can adjust their teaching methods and strategies. If a large number of students are struggling with a particular concept, the teacher may revisit it in a different way.
3. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: Assessments help pinpoint where a student is doing well and where they might need more help. This information helps teachers give targeted feedback to encourage improvement.
4. Set Learning Goals: Regular assessments help set academic goals for students. They can see their own progress, which motivates them to work harder and reach higher levels of achievement.
5. Provide Feedback: Assessments give students feedback on their performance. This feedback can guide their learning, showing them what they understand and what needs more attention.
6. Support Personalized Learning: Assessments help tailor the educational experience to each student. If a student struggles with a subject, teachers can provide additional resources, extra practice, or alternative methods of learning to help them succeed.
7. Prepare for Future Learning: Assessments help ensure that students are ready for the next step in their academic journey. This could mean mastering foundational skills in one grade before moving on to more complex content in the next.
8. Inform Parents and Schools: Assessment results provide valuable information to parents and schools, helping them understand how well students are meeting academic standards. This fosters collaboration between parents, teachers, and the school to support the student’s growth. 

In short, assessments are tools that help ensure students receive the support they need to learn, grow, and succeed in school. They are not just about grades; they are an essential part of the learning process.

Types of Assessments:

1. State standardized assessments are mandated and fulfill state or federal testing requirements that assess student proficiency and achievement. 
2. Universal Screening, Benchmarking, Diagnostics and/or Progress Monitoring Assessments track District-wide performance and growth over time and provide teachers with student skill-level information to inform planning and instruction.  Benchmark assessments are designed to check how much progress a student has made in a particular subject or skill area, typically at key points during the school year (e.g., at the beginning, middle, and end of the year). These assessments help teachers determine if they are on track to meet the learning goals set for that year.

What assessments do we administer?

The Pennsylvania Department of Education requires all schools to administer the PSSA in Grades 3-8 assessing students in the areas of Math, Reading and Science (Grades 5 and 8 only).   

Acadience (formerly known as DIBELS) is a set of assessments designed to measure essential early literacy and academic skills in students, primarily in the elementary grades. The purpose of Acadience is to assess how well students are progressing in their reading and other foundational skills.  Acadience measures:

Early Literacy Skills

Acadience primarily focuses on assessing students' early reading skills, which are crucial for future academic success. These skills include:

• Phonemic Awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in spoken words, such as identifying the first sound in a word or rhyming.
• Alphabetic Principle: Understanding the relationship between letters and sounds (e.g., knowing that "b" makes the /b/ sound).
• Fluency with Reading: This includes how quickly and accurately students can read words in context. It focuses on reading fluently, which supports comprehension.
• Vocabulary: Acadience measures students’ understanding of word meanings, which is vital for both reading comprehension and overall language development.
• Reading Comprehension: Later in the primary grades, Acadience also assesses how well students understand what they read.

Key Areas Acadience Assesses:

• Letter Naming Fluency (LNF): Measures how quickly students can name letters, helping gauge their familiarity with the alphabet.
• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF): Assesses students' ability to break down words into individual sounds.
• Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF): Tests students’ ability to decode unfamiliar, made-up words, which measures their understanding of phonetic principles.
• Oral Reading Fluency (ORF): Measures how accurately and fluently students can read a passage.
• Vocabulary: Assesses students’ understanding of word meanings.
• Reading Comprehension: Measures students' ability to understand and make sense of what they read.

Renaissance Star Math is an assessment tool used to measure students' mathematical skills and progress. In grades K-3, Star Math is designed to evaluate key foundational math skills that are crucial for early academic success in mathematics. Here's what Star Math assesses in students from Kindergarten through 3rd grade:

• In Kindergarten, Star Math focuses more on foundational concepts such as counting, number recognition, and basic shapes.
• In 1st and 2nd grades, it assesses addition and subtraction facts, number patterns, place value, and beginning multiplication concepts in more depth.
• By 3rd grade, Star Math includes more complex concepts like multi-digit addition and subtraction, basic multiplication, and more advanced problem-solving.  Star Math is typically an adaptive assessment, which means the questions adjust based on the student’s responses. If a student answers questions correctly, the system may present more challenging problems, and if the student answers incorrectly, it will present easier questions. This helps ensure that the assessment is appropriately challenging and provides a more accurate measure of a student’s ability.   Star Math helps teachers track student progress over time, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.  Based on the results, teachers can identify students who may need additional support in specific areas and provide tailored interventions.

CDT (Classroom Diagnostic Tools) is a set of online assessments designed to help teachers understand the academic strengths and weaknesses of their students in grades 3-8. The primary purpose of the CDT in Pennsylvania schools is to provide formative assessments that can guide instructional decisions, helping teachers identify areas where students may need additional support or challenge.

For students in grades 3-5, the CDT serves several purposes:

1. Identify Academic Needs: The CDT helps teachers identify gaps in student understanding, especially in subjects like reading, math, and writing. By pinpointing specific areas of weakness, the assessment allows teachers to tailor their instruction to meet the needs of individual students.
2. Guide Instructional Planning: Teachers can use CDT results to adjust their teaching strategies, making lessons more focused on areas where students may be struggling. This allows for more personalized instruction that targets the needs of each student or group.
3. Monitor Progress: CDTs can be administered multiple times throughout the school year, which helps track student progress over time. This allows for adjustments in teaching methods or interventions if students are not making sufficient progress.
4. Provide Early Intervention: Early identification of academic challenges through CDT assessments allows for timely interventions, which can prevent students from falling further behind. This is especially important in elementary grades like 3-5, where foundational skills in subjects like math and reading are being built.
5. Align with State Standards: The CDT assessments are aligned with Pennsylvania state standards, ensuring that students are on track to meet the expectations set by the state for their grade level. This helps schools measure how well their students are performing in relation to state expectations.

Overall, the purpose of the CDT in Pennsylvania schools is to provide teachers with data-driven insights that inform teaching practices, support student learning, and ensure that students are meeting the academic standards for their grade level.

Curriculum-based assessments (CBAs) are assessments that are directly aligned with the content and skills outlined in a school’s curriculum. Unlike standardized tests, which are often broader and not specifically tied to a particular curriculum, CBAs focus on measuring a student's understanding and mastery of the specific material they are learning in the classroom. These assessments provide valuable insights into how well students are meeting the learning objectives set out by their teachers.   These are regularly administered to students and are generated most often using our District’s resources.

For example, our District’s phonics program, Really Great Reading (RGR), includes a feature whereby assessments are presented in the form of a digital “playground.”  The Reading Playground helps students independently practice the foundational literacy skills they are learning in Countdown, Blast, and HD Word. This Reading Playground is essentially a play-based digital platform that merges learning, assessment, and practice.  It includes research-aligned activities designed to accelerate the acquisition of skills and knowledge necessary to transform unfamiliar words into familiar and instantly recognizable words.

In addition, because it is an adaptive platform it recognizes the diversity of students’ abilities to master their phonics skills at different rates and with different amounts of practice.