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[Guest Blog Post] An Adaptive Diagnostic Will Rock Your World (and other reasons to choose adaptive assessments)

By: Rob Waldron on December 3rd, 2014

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[Guest Blog Post] An Adaptive Diagnostic Will Rock Your World (and other reasons to choose adaptive assessments)

Personalized Learning  |  Blended Learning  |  Curriculum Strategy & Adoption

Take a look at your smartphone. You can’t live without it, right? In two years, not having an adaptive assessment tied to individualized instruction for children will be as ridiculous as not having a smartphone.

Imagine having data in one place that tells you if and how students are progressing from year-to-year versus having to cobble together data from different assessments, administered by different teachers in different grades that still give an incomplete view of student achievement. Advanced technology is now available which provides a deep, customized evaluation of student performance and tracks student growth consistently and continuously over a student’s entire K–12 career. This technology is an adaptive diagnostic. 

Adaptive-Diagnostics Rock

In addition to tracking growth, an adaptive diagnostic  is especially beneficial for identifying gaps in students’ skills from prior years. As districts transition to the more rigorous Common Core or other new college and career readiness standards, on-grade level students may find themselves below grade level due to standards shifts; and previously below-level students may now be even further behind. Teachers need a way to get to the root causes of why students are struggling so they can provide personalized, differentiated instruction for each student, regardless of grade level; because we all know that providing 5th grade content to a 5th grade student who is performing at a 3rd grade level is only going to discourage her, not teach her. The best solution for these challenges is an adaptive diagnostic. The results reveal not only on-grade level skills gaps, but any that may exist across grade levels – insights that grade level fixed form assessments simply cannot provide.

 Many educators familiar with fixed-form assessments may have some questions about the information gained from an adaptive diagnostic: With a limited number of test items, how can I be sure of the skills my students have and have not mastered? How do I know that my student has mastered a skill, if he has not been tested on it? This is where the science  behind a sophisticated adaptive diagnostic – like the one used in i-Ready  – with a bank of thousands of test items come into play.

The right adaptive diagnostic not only offers high precision and validity, but also high efficiency, giving educators the data they need to pinpoint student performance more accurately and in less time than with traditional fixed-form assessments. By dynamically selecting test items based on student response patterns, adaptive diagnostics are able to derive large amounts of information from a limited number of test items.

Think about it like a Patriot missile for education – it lands squarely on the target. That means teachers spend more targeted instructional time on the areas students need to focus on, rather than on skills they have already mastered.    

This also means teachers can see how children are doing every day, in every class, with every teacher. No longer will teachers wait for an April test, get results in September, and then try again. They will know daily.

Choose an adaptive diagnostic, and you will know much more about your students, be able to assess less, and provide the personalized instruction each student deserves for every chance of success.

 

Rob Waldron is the CEO of Curriculum Associates, an education company that provides research-based K-12 assessment and instruction programs in reading and math, including i-Ready®  Diagnostic & Instruction.  Learn more about “The Science Behind i-Ready’s Adaptive Diagnostic.”

 

 

 

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