NECC 2009 News

Acuity UnWired Ties Formative Assessments to Classroom Clickers

• By David Nagel
• 07/01/09

CTB/McGraw-Hill (a unit of McGraw-Hill Education) has released Acuity UnWired, a new tool that allows the company's Acuity InFormative Assessment to integrate with interactive classroom response systems (also knows as classroom clickers). The announcement was made at this week's National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington, DC.

The software allows McGraw-Hill's assessments assessments to work with student response devices, including those provided by Qwizdom and eInstruction. According to the company, the technology allows instructors to generate "standards-aligned Acuity reports within minutes. The instantaneous feedback provided through Acuity UnWired gives educators the ability to make data-driven instructional decisions without delay, providing students with targeted instruction in real-time."

McGraw-Hill said it piloted the technology in 14 trials involving more than 300 students of varying ages.

"Giving teachers the ability to get immediate feedback, without having to grade a pile of papers, is very powerful," said Joe O'Reilly, executive director of student achievement support for Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, in a statement released this week. "For example, as one teacher watched her students answer questions on a test, she pointed to one question on her computer screen and said, 'They should know that.' So, when the test was done, she immediately started re-teaching. This truly expands the power of Acuity in the classroom and its strength as a formative tool to immediately inform classroom instruction. Teachers who have taken our course on using the clickers and Acuity report that students are doing better, the instructional activities that can be assigned engage students, and some students have actually asked for more formative tests to show how they are doing."

Further information can be found here.