Assessment is an integral part of learning, particularly for English Learners. Having an effective strategy for ongoing formative assessment is critical to accelerate literacy development. Read on to learn how to take advantage of Footsteps2Brilliance’s advanced assessment algorithms and comprehensive Class Dashboard reports to get the most out of assessments without taking away from important instructional time.
How to incorporate assessment into your literacy instruction
Formative assessments are built in when students read and play on Footsteps2Brilliance at home or at school. Using sophisticated scoring algorithms that evaluate a student’s performance within the context of millions of scores nationwide, Footsteps2Brilliance gives teachers the insight they need to easily differentiate learning, create targeted interventions, and monitor student progress towards sufficiently challenging goals.
4 Steps for Efficient Formative Assessment Usage
The Class Proficiency section of the Class Dashboard gives insight into specific student needs by skill area. The data show students’ strengths and weaknesses across the following skills: Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Language Development, Comprehension, and Logic & Reasoning.
Many teachers find, especially with English Learners, that students of the same reading level can have drastically different areas of need. Creating small groups based only on reading level isn’t an efficient way to use assessment data. The Class Dashboard identifies which students have shared areas of difficulty and automatically creates small groups for targeted instruction. Teachers can also use these data to assign pre-designed Footsteps2Brilliance lessons to work on independently at school or at home. As students’ needs change, the groups are updated in the Class Dashboard, creating real-time flexibility for teachers.
Teachers can easily access whole class growth data in skill areas, as well as detailed usage data that provide insight into when students use Footsteps2Brilliance, where in the app they spend the most time, and how usage is impacting their growth.
With CKU Pre-Reader and CKU I Can Read, teachers can quickly see how students are progressing through the systematic phonics sequence.
As students create books and writing in the system, teachers automatically collect a digital portfolio of authentic writing as evidence of student language and literacy development.
