Common Formative Assessments Using Study Island

Study Island is much more than a drill ‘n’ kill/test-prep tool. Although there are many other new features like the paperless, digitized Writing Assignment, Parent Notification, LiveView, and Common Core Standards, I would like to highlight the Custom Assessment tool in this posting.

The custom assessment option allows teachers to create online assessments for one student in a class, a group of students in a class or an entire class. The teacher can browse through questions by topic or standard. He or she can select a topic question and tell the system how many of that type of question he or she would like included in the test.

The software will randomize the numbers in a math question or change the text in a language arts question. This allows the teacher to have multiple questions that assess the same skill.

By having the ability to create custom assessments, faculty members are able to quickly develop formative assessments that will help guide instruction. The fact that these assessments can be taken online, with a student response system (classroom “clicker”) or on paper provide a number of options.

The newest release of Study Island now allows teachers to share the custom assessments that they create with the other teachers in their school as part of the teachers’ Custom Assessment Library.

When implemented correctly, Study Island is a valuable instructional tool. The software offers numerous, actionable reports, customizable options and an intuitive interface. Teachers can collaborate by sharing not only the Custom Assessments but also the resulting data. Reports can even be automatically emailed to parents

This article was adapted from an original post from:
Mr. Walker's Technology Blog
Developing 21st Century Skills One BYTE at a Time
http://blogs.jefftwp.org/wordpress/walker/2011/01/31/common-formative-assessments-using-study-island/