Tell us your thoughts on white papers…

Riverside’s Research and Measurement Services team is considering the development of a series of white papers on topics related to educational assessment and measurement. The goal of the white papers is to inform interested audiences, in a general non-technical way, about current assessment issues and topics.

They are interested in gathering your thoughts. In particular, they are interested in your feedback and comments on:

• White papers in general – do educators, especially school administrators, find them useful and of interest?
• Is there a preferred format for such documents? Adobe Acrobat? A web site or blog?
• Is there a preferred length?

In addition, our team has drawn up a list of potential topics. They would appreciate your feedback and comments on whether any of these are of greater interest to you:

1. Response to Intervention (RTI).  What is RTI and how is it useful to students and educators?
2. Growth measurement.   What are the basic models for measuring growth and how can the results be interpreted?
3. Formative Assessment.  What is formative assessment (vs. interim assessment, benchmark testing, classroom testing, etc.)?
4. Comprehensive Assessment Systems.  What are comprehensive assessment systems and how can they be useful for school systems?
5. Scaling options for showing growth.
6. Kindergarten readiness and early childhood assessment.  What’s appropriate and available for assessing young children?
7. Adaptive Testing.  What is adaptive testing and in what situations is it most useful?
8. Assessing ESL students.  What are federal requirements for ESL assessment of school-age students?
9. Value-added or “productivity” systems.  What are these systems, how are they useful, and what are their limitations?
10. International benchmarking.  Describe TIMSS, PERLS, and other international benchmarking programs.  How are these useful and what are their limitations?
11. Common Core Standards.  What are the common core state standards and the common core college readiness standards, and how are they designed to fit together?
12. Automated scoring of constructed response items.  How do these systems work?  What is the state of the art?
13. What are reliability and validity, and why are they important in measurement?
14. Why is test security important in many assessment situations?

We look forward to your comments…

Which way of representing folders do you prefer?

Our design team is busy working on developing a new foldering system. Users will be able to store their exams, etc., in folders. There will be various levels of permissions around folders. For example, users at a district level might create a “district” folder and use it as a central repository for exams used district-wide. They might opt to make this folder “read only.” In other words, classroom teachers across the district could open/view exams posted in this folder, but they could not edit them in any way.The extent to which folders are permissioned would be configured by each district to best suit your needs. Our design team is also exploring how best to allow sharing of such content across districts (for places like Michigan where users are collaborating across many districts.)

Users will also have a personal folder they can use to store exams that they have created. Users will have the ability to copy/share exams they have made with other users – placing copies in other folders that they have permission to do so.

In general, users would have the ability to create and name new folders at their level of the organization. For example, classroom teachers could generally create folders within their building, but not across the district. There will be options to override these defaults.

Our design team is exploring a couple of different ways of visually represent these folders on the screen, and we’d like your feedback, comments and insights. For simplicity, I’ll call the first design “Folder Design 1,” the second design “Folder Design 2,” and the third design (you guessed it) “Folder Design 3.”

For now, ignore the color schemes and fonts used in these examples. Those will follow the final “look and feel” of the application itself. Focus for now on the way the folders are displayed/organized on the screen.

(Hint: If you click on the visuals below, you can see a larger view of them. Use your browser’s Back button to bring you back to this post.)

Folder Design 1

The example (above) keeps the folders (and exams located within them) in a more in-line structure. Users would click the toggle to reveal the exams located in the folder.

If the list of exams was long, then “pagination” controls would appear at the bottom of the screen, allowing users to navigate from Page 1 to Page 2, etc.

Folder Design 2

In this (above) design, folders are placed at the left. When a user clicks a folder, the list of exams within it would appear on the right side of the screen.

Folder Design 3

In this example, the folders act more like a “floating panel,” which users can hide or view. This example shows the panel hidden from view. Below, an example with the user making the folder panel visible:

Post your comments and let us know what you think of them, and more important, which you think Edusoft and DataDirector users would prefer.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for for 15 years”

That’s a quote from Wired Magazine‘s Chris Anderson as he showed off a prototype of what that publication might look like on Apple’s new iPad. Anderson made this comment during a recent TED conference.

(By the way, if you aren’t familiar with TED, click here to learn more. Very cool stuff, but that’s the subject of a posting for another day…)

Click here to watch the Wired/iPad prototype. I’d encourage you to take a few moments and watch this clip. You can also access yet another iPad magazine prototype here (although be warned the content of this one is a little more racy).

After watching these examples, my imagination immediately started to churn out ideas for how these new multimedia capabilities could be harnessed in an educational environment. In the Wired example above, you’ll see product advertisements that allow the viewer to actually spin the product around to view it from any angle. I can easily envision applications for this in content areas like mathematics and science. In my opinion, the whole gesture approach of the iPad, made famous by Apple’s iPhone of course, is very developmentally-appropriate for younger students. It’s a natural thing for young children to want to point, touch and manipulate items with their fingers.

Have any of your district’s been thinking about the iPad, or similar technologies, and the role they might play as educational content delivery platforms? I’ll love to read your thoughts…

Beyond reporting of typical student achievement data

When most of us think about the types of reporting done within systems like DataDirector and Edusoft, we typically think about the analysis of student achievement data. We expect these types of systems to show us patterns and trends in terms of how are students fared on a districtwide benchmark assessment, or perhaps a more informal measure created by a classroom teacher. Additionally, some of our users import other types of data – like grades – into these systems.

As districts become more sophisticated in their use of data, I’m curious as to what other types of data would be useful to examine – especially when combined with student achievement data – to yield more insight into program effectiveness. For example, will districts increasingly want to ingest professional credential information into our systems? Are there key financial metrics that might yield additional patterns and trends would viewed alongside student achievement data?

I’d like to hear your ideas on what other “non-traditional” types of data we should explore as we continue to enhance our reporting capabilities…

Congratulations Jeff Piontek – ISTE 2010 “Crowdsource” Keynote Speaker!

Riverside Publishing congratulates our own Customer Advisory Panel member Jeff Piontek for being named the ISTE 2010 “Crowdsource” Keynote Speaker. ISTE 2010 is formally known as the annual National Educational Computing Conference (NECC). This is the first year that ISTE has used “crowdsource” techniques to allow the audience to select its keynote speaker. You can learn more about the process ISTE used to gather votes by clicking here. Jeff garnered an impressive 35% of total votes cast.

We can’t wait to hear all the good things Jeff has to say at ISTE 2010 in Denver in June. If you want to learn more about the cool things Jeff is doing with regards to instructional technology, click here.

Again, congratulations to Jeff for this tremendous honor and recognition by his peers!

What are the right (or most used) Key Performance Indicators for you?

I’ve been thinking about dashboards and visual displays of data lately – and the concept of Key Performance Indicators (sometimes called Critical Success Factors). Click here for an interesting study on the use of KPIs in primary schools in the United Kingdom.

I’m curious about how much KPIs are being used in schools today and by what levels of audiences. Are KPIs seen only as a tool for administrators, or do they also have value for classroom practitioners? Do building-level administrators see value in the same KPIs that district administrators do?

I’m also curious as to what people consider to be the key Key Performance Indicators to track and monitor (sorry, I couldn’t resist the double use of the word “key” there). Said another way, are all KPIs created equally?

Congratulations to Jeff Piontek!

Riverside Publishing congratulates our Advisory Panel member Jeff Piontek for being a nominated finalist keynote speaker candidate for ISTE 2010 in Denver.

Check out this link to read all the nice things people are saying in support of Jeff’s nomination. If you are eligible to vote, we encourage you to vote for Jeff!

Is the movement to a “common core” of standards good or bad?

The U.S. Department of Education recently finished up a “listening tour” in a few key cities across the country, gathering public input on changes in assessment and accountability programs as part of the emerging Race To The Top (RttT) initiative. The federal government will release a block of grants to states (or consortia of states) in March 2010 focused on assessment related to RttT. While a lot of the details are still being pulled together, it is clear that the federal government will award the assessment grants to states that align their programs around the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Educators have been focused on student achievement of individual state (and sometimes also local) standards for years now. The idea of an emerging set of “meta” standards that all states align to is an intriguing one.

So, our good friends of the Blog-o-sphere, it makes us wonder what all of you think about this concept. Are the Common Core standards the next natural progression in a standards-based alignment of education? Or, is this some sinister move toward a nationally-mandated curriculum? Is is something else entirely? As always, we love to read your thoughts…

We have contest winners!

Congratulations to Barb Williams and Rikki Smith! They are the winners in our first blog contest. Each has won a $100 gift card from Amazon.com. Barb won by posting a comment about the use of student response systems in schools. Rikki won by becoming one of our new “followers” on Twitter.

Barb and Rikki – We’ve sent you each e-mails so we can get your gift cards to you right away. On behalf of everyone at Riverside Publishing, congratulations again and enjoy your shopping spree on Amazon.com!

How can we better involve students in active reflection of their own learning?

One of the topics I have been thinking about a lot lately is how we can foster an environment that encourages students to be reflective about their own learning? When I was a classroom teacher, I tried various things to encourage my students to both set goals, and then monitor their own progress toward those goals. I did a lot of cooperative learning in my classroom, and also explored variations that encouraged teams to set and monitor group learning goals.

It seems that a lot of the focus on the analysis of assessment data has been focused on teachers and administrators. That’s appropriate, because those audiences obviously need to be able to make meaningful decisions based on the data at hand. Still, I wonder if there are things we could be doing to facilitate conversations between teachers and students, among families, and by students themselves, around a more active reflection of student learning?

I’d like to hear your ideas about what we might do within the current Edusoft or DataDirector systems to encourage this type of thinking on the part of our students. Thoughts?