June 2004 — Advertorial
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Connecting People and Information to Improve Student Achievement
In the district deployment, the district manages all aspects of the testing process from creation and administration to scoring and distributing results. This allows classroom teachers to focus on what they do best - teaching. Over time, some teachers can construct their own tests. Concert Assessment provides tools to analyze specific test items and tests. The resultant statistics help the test creators understand if the items are working as they are supposed to. This makes tests more valid and reliable.Districts and states are moving from traditional multiple-choice test items focused on lower-level skills to enhanced multiple-choice test items assessing higher-level procedural skills. In addition, Web-based assessment programs can score both multiple-choice question formats and extended-response question formats, including essays. Technology is proving to be highly accurate in assessing extended-response questions. This is extremely important because the format and content of a test can affect instruction. If the content of a test is lower-level skills, teachers will provide similar instruction. If the content uses enhanced multiple-choice items or the test format requires students to construct responses, there is a greater likelihood of higher-level thinking skills being addressed. Deploying such a test will support teachers using instruction addressed at higher-level thinking skills.
With the instruction and assessment systems connected, common links to instructional resources and insight into professional development needs can be tied to standards. If a student or group of students is having difficulty learning a particular standard, there are links available to aligned instructional resources. The capability to link directly from test results to resources is another illustration of the power of connections.
Data Analysis
A system that can store up-to-date information on students, test scores and other performance data, and display that information in a variety of ways keyed to a specific audience, is critically important to understanding student progress. Concert Inform provides these capabilities in such a way that a user can look at data at the district, school, classroom and student levels - aggregated or disaggregated - in a variety of graphical or tabular formats. It also can incorporate data from multiple sources. As a result, a teacher can click on a student's name and see all performance data from state tests, district tests and national normed tests all compared to cut scores entered by the district. Having access to multiple displays of the data can provide the level of detail necessary for a conference with parents and for analysis in comparison to other students in the class and across the district. It also allows teachers to provide much more fully informed instruction.
Connecting Concert Inform to the student information system provides huge efficiencies on top of the enhanced decision-making. There is no need for additional data entry, and the data are the same in the analysis and decision support tool as they are in the attendance roster. The opportunity for data entry error is diminished to near zero by having everything connected to one student information system.
