Monday, November 20, 2017

Are You Currently Measuring Both Student Growth and Achievement (SGA)?

How ATI Measures and Reports SGA 


Understanding Student Growth and Achievement
Understanding the terms “growth” and “achievement” are crucial in education. Although both of these measures are critical, they provide different insight on student learning. Achievement measures a student’s performance at a single point in time against a standard. Growth, however, measures a student’s progress between two points over time.

Simply put, having one without the other is like having a photo without having the fuller story captured by the entire photo-album. One provides a single snapshot and the other provides the more complete story. If you want the complete story of student performance, one must accurately consider both growth and achievement together.     

We All Love Analogies
Here’s a sports analogy: a track-star ran a 1-mile race in 5-minutes flat, and resultantly qualified for a national tournament. Although we’re happy for his achievement, we really want to know how our track-star improves over the entire season. After six months, is our athlete growing faster or is he still hovering at 5-minutes? This information helps us predict if our athlete is on track to qualify for the Olympics! More importantly, if he’s not on track, we can use this data to implement a performance improvement plan before it’s too late.

How to Easily Measure Student Growth and Achievement  
In education, measuring both growth and achievement gives us the complete story of student learning, and this becomes valuable in developing intervention plans to ensure a student’s future academic success. 

ATI’s Galileo K-12 Online Student Growth and Achievement Report offers easy to use growth and achievement reporting. This report provides a student’s developmental level at time one and time two. It then cross-classifies student growth and achievement into performance categories. When tests and students are selected in the report, a student’s data is displayed into one of four quadrants: 1) lower growth/higher achievement; 2) higher growth/higher achievement; 3) lower growth/lower achievement; and 4) lower growth/lower achievement.

Additionally, the report is available to class-, school-, and district-level users. That is, it can be configured for a single class or entire school or an entire district (i.e., from small picture to big picture). It also lets teachers with multiple classes of the same subject categorize all their students into the same growth categorization, which streamlines the reporting process. Lastly, SGA reporting lets educators run a report on any two benchmark-assessments (i.e., a pre-test and post-test) and compares the actual growth against predicted growth expectations…we like to know where we stack-up.


Why is this Important?
In short, when growth and achievement data are properly used together, in easy-to-use reports, it can produce significant clarity on how to track and improve student learning.

More Info
Learn more about the SGA Report and other dynamic reports in Galileo by contacting one of our knowledgeable field services coordinators for a demonstration. The Galileo K-12 Online Student Growth and Achievement Report is easily accessible from the Staff Launchpad or Administrator Dashboard.  

Other Topics of Interest
Comparing Results from Benchmarks When the Questions and Standards Are Different
Galileo Dashboard Reports Facilitate Differentiated Instruction

Monday, November 13, 2017

What You Need to Know About the New Reporting Functions on the Teacher Dashboard

ATI recently released a new widget on the Galileo K-12 Teacher Dashboard.  This new widget displays Benchmark Performance levels on pre, post and benchmark assessments.  The Benchmark Performance Levels reporting widget displays the percentage of students in each performance level. This performance level is based on where a student’s Development Level (DL) score falls relative to the cut scores and the respective levels, on each benchmark assessment taken. The cut scores on the benchmark assessments are set to correspond to the cut scores and performance bands on the state standardized test. When a user drills down via the View Detailed Benchmark Performance Levels link, he or she will see student and aggregate data including performance levels, student scores, and standards mastery.  New functionality has been added which includes a search and sorting capability.


Additional Resources
Learn more about the Performance Widget with the Quick Reference Guide: http://bit.ly/2zyzebV
Explore the Benchmark Performance Levels in Galileo with this brief webinar: http://bit.ly/2jmOy4U

Written by Kerridan Kawecki , Professional Development Director

Monday, November 6, 2017

How to Implement the Galileo Digital Curriculum Platform for Free

It’s not every day you get something for free with no strings attached. But it’s true in this case. The Galileo K-12 Online system now comes with an innovative, flexible Digital Curriculum Platform at no additional charge. Our team of engineers have created a dynamic solution for seamlessly integrating standards-based differentiated instruction, comprehensive, reliable, and valid assessment, and they’ve created an easy way to access actionable reporting from the Galileo Dashboards

Creating a curriculum platform that would support educators was really important to us. We spoke to several educators and teachers and discovered what would be helpful in an online curriculum platform. The system has user-friendly tools making getting started easy and intuitive. The Platform supports the ability to incorporate existing curriculum and lessons, develop new curriculum and lesson plan content, and share and modify curriculum and lessons online. With the Galileo Platform it’s now possible to build the curriculum to suit your district or charter needs. Curriculum builder tools support the inclusion of multimedia instructional content within courses, units, lessons, and activities. And it doesn’t stop there.

Innovative Galileo Builder Tools for the Digital Age

Data from integrated assessment of student learning is available to inform decisions regarding the next instructional offerings and possible modifications of the curriculum itself. The Platform also enables searching for and scheduling popular instructional resources including those from KHAN ACADEMY®*, LearnZillion and ATI prebuilt Instructional Dialogs

Learn more about the various Galileo Digital Curriculum Platform benefits. 

Link to other resources:
Seminar: Digital Curriculum Toolkit and Collections: Standards-Aligned for Arizona Teachers Learn more   Register
Galileo’s Digital Curriculum Platform Integrates Assessment, Reporting, and Instruction Learn more
Discover the First of its Kind: The Galileo K-12 Online Digital Curriculum Platform Learn more

*KHAN ACADEMY® materials are also available for free at www.khanacademy.org.