Working with a group of four other education professionals, we created a tool for teachers and administrators to be able to access, track and graph ISAT scores for students in grade 3 at Disney Magnet School in Chicago. The students could be arranged by homeroom, gender, race, ESL/Non, special education/non and whether they were in a remedial reading program called DI (Direct Instruction) and by number of years in that program. Information educators could access included top and bottom scorers for each area, relationships between areas and scores and relationships between reading and math.
ISAT Score Data
Benchmark Project
Behavior Data
Additional
Project
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Course Artifacts
Personally, my own productivity was enhanced through the use of this tool in its connection to special education students. I was able to access the scores, the rankings and the areas of difficulty for the students in my classroom through this tool. I was also able to identify homerooms where students similar to my students with special needs score-wise may reside, thereby improving my ability to pair with regular education classrooms and provide inclusionary educational opportunities for the students in my classroom. By knowing the relative rankings and scores of students by homeroom, I could plan to coordinate with those homerooms where my students may fit in more cohesively, due to similar abilities in reading or math. With the graphing capabilities of this tool, I was able to provide visual representations of the score levels of student in math and reading by homeroom. This allowed me to easily display the appropriateness of teaming or pairing for regular education teachers who previously had not had access to this sort of information.
ISTE-TF.4 STANDARD: Assessment and Evaluation -- Educational technology facilitators apply technology to facilitate a variety of effective assessment and evaluation strategies.
This evaluation of scores tool was an effective assessment strategy for administrators and other educators to gain information about students in the fourth grade who had taken the ISAT tests in third grade. The information could be filtered by gender, homeroom, ethnicity, whether or not students received special education services, whether they exhibited behavior problems resulting in administrative contact (suspensions or other contact) and whether or not the students had accessed a reading program called Direct Instruction in their time at Disney School. All these areas could be filtered by reading and math scores, including top and bottom scorers and math with reading relationships. The administrators and other educators could use this tool to create heterogeneous classroom assignments, identify students in need of additional help, determine some of the effectiveness of the Direct Instruction program, and generally see the fallout of scores for students taking the ISAT at Disney in the third grade. This could later be connected to scores for these same students once they take other tests, such as the reading, math or social sciences portions of the ISAT in future grades.
ISTE-TF.5 STANDARD: Productivity and Professional
Practice -- Educational technology facilitators apply technology to enhance
and improve personal productivity and professional practice.
With the tool that I created for this class, I applied the use of Microsoft
Excel, including functions such as VlookUp to link spreadsheet pages to
master and to create a labeled score corresponding to the ISAT math and
reading ISAT scores. I used Chart Wizard to create charts to graphically
represent data using the functions CountIf, Average and Percentages. The
use of charts improves personal productivity for administrators or other
teachers using the tool because the information is graphically represented
and can be more easily read than in spreadsheet formats. The AutoFilter
feature was used to quickly isolate data for immediate analysis. This
allows administrators or other educators using the tool to quicky access
the data they are interested in viewing without having to spend time filtering
the information manually. The professional practice of educators and administrators
using this tool is enhanced due to its specificity to the population of
students and the programs offered at this one institution. Educators and
administrators can use the tool to track important test data for this
group of students, including the students’ standardized test scores
and their involvement in unique school-based learning groups, as well
as, information about the student make-up of classrooms, behavioral data
and personal statistics, such as gender.
