Assessment Tools Help Increase Student Success

Clear assessment has a significant influence on instruction. Today, educators must ensure that their students meet rigorous state standards. In order for teachers to provide targeted instruction and effectively help students achieve state standard mastery, they need to be able to accurately track student progress and diagnose skill gaps throughout the school year and make instructional adjustments accordingly. And the best way to track student progress is with online assessment tools.

Assessment technology has come a long way to help teachers track student skills sets and ensure they are mastering key concepts that align to state standards. Assessment tools can provide ongoing feedback so that both teachers and students can assess progress to ensure students are learning targeted concepts, or core ideas reflected in state standards. By assessing how students apply content knowledge to critical-thinking, problem-solving, and/or analytical tasks, teachers can understand what the assessment reveals about a students learning. In turn, teachers can assign critical learning paths when needed.

Leveraging technology-based assessment tools, such as those available from PLATO Learning, teachers can easily keep track of student progress, via an online report that generates a performance profile at the end of test or course. The diagnostic data generated through PLATO Learning's online assessment tools gives teachers immediate information they can act on instructionally.

For example, PLATO® Test Packs with Prescriptions on the PLATO Learning Environment™ (PLE™) provides grade-level reading/language arts and mathematics fixed benchmark assessments for grades 2-11. PLATO Test Packs then generates personalized, prescriptive assignments to PLATO® online content targeted to each student's unique areas of need.

Test offerings include three cumulative, comparable test versions-a pre-test, a mid-test, and a post-test—which automatically adjust instruction over time to track student progress against standards. PLATO Test Packs give teachers the flexibility to choose to have PLE automatically prescribe assignments or make manual adjustments themselves before assigning lessons.

Consistent alignment between test items and PLATO® instructional modules assures that learners follow individual learning paths that include rigorous reading/language arts and mathematics instruction. And because students can access PLATO content wherever they have Internet access, teaching can be truly personalized and extend beyond the classroom. Read more >>

PLATO® eduTest Assessment is a comprehensive online assessment solution for grades K-8 that quickly identifies strengths and needs for students, classrooms, schools, or entire districts and guides instructional decisions to improve student achievement over time.

This solution enables effective instruction by monitoring individual strengths and needs early and often. Teachers may use its Strengths & Needs reports to pinpoint exactly how individual students and classes performed against each state standard, allowing them to customize individual and/or group learning by targeting instruction where it is needed most.

PLATO eduTest Assessment also provides an item and test authoring tool that allows a district to edit our assessments or create their own to satisfy additional needs in specific subjects, grades, and languages. Read More >>

PLATO® Assessment Solutions feature more than 100,000 high-quality test items aligned to state, national, and provincial standards. PLATO Learning's online assessment assists in placement, ongoing monitoring, and accountability—so you ensure students receive the personalized instruction key to academic success.

Assessment technology has come a long way to help teachers track student skills sets and ensure they are mastering key concepts that align to state standards. And the best way to track student progress is with proper assessment tools, such as PLATO Learning's online assessment tool.