Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Riverside Insights Launches Battelle Early Childhood Assessment with Updated Data Validity

Riverside Insights®, a leading developer of research-based assessments that provide insights to help elevate potential, announced today the official launch of the Battelle® Developmental Inventory, 3rd Edition™ (BDI-3™) to customers in the United States and internationally, including Canada and Mexico. The enhancements to the BDI-3 include expanded digital administration and reporting tools, as well as updated standardization and norms. This makes the BDI-3 the most comprehensive early childhood assessment on the market. With this release, Riverside is also the first assessment provider to introduce an affordable subscription model that enables continued enhancements of the testing experience – from administration to reporting.

Recommended in 44 states and listed as a preferred state assessment in 16, the BDI enables early childhood development centers, schools, school psychologists, speech pathologists and private clinicians to obtain early insight into a child’s developmental progress, evaluate readiness for school, and inform eligibility for special education resources. It has consistently been the industry standard for early identification, offering the most comprehensive and up-to-date norms. The BDI-3 measures mastery of developmental milestones and behaviors from birth to age 7 years, 11 months across the five critical domains – communication, social-emotional, adaptive, motor and cognitive – and 13 subdomains.

The third edition has been expanded to include the Battelle Early Academic Survey (BEAS), which measures early foundational literacy and mathematics skills for children aged 3 years, 6 months to 7 years, 11 months.…Read More

New “Testing America’s Freedom” Podcast from NWEA Examines Equity in Education

NWEA, the not-for-profit educational assessment provider, announced today the launch of its new podcast, Testing America’s Freedom. Hosted by Dr. Aaliyah Samuel, Executive Vice President, Government Affairs & Partnerships at NWEA, the episodic series explores the role of race and assessment in American public education through thought-provoking interviews with current and future leaders in education.

Testing America’s Freedom delves deep into the lesser-known history of laws and policies that have perpetuated and exacerbated racial inequities within the education system. Samuel and her guests explore topics such as school funding, the importance of diversity in the education workforce, assessment purposes and design, and their link to modern-day systemic racism, discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by these urgent issues.

“The inequities within our public education system do not exist by accident, they are the result of carefully orchestrated policies that used tools like school funding, divestment and testing to perpetuate achievement and outcome gaps for students of color,” says Samuel. “Although the past may be grim, as educational leaders, we have the opportunity to use these same tools to reimagine systems of learning and teaching so we can construct a more equitable future. My hope is that this podcast can be a catalyst for our education and policy communities to think about how we can collectively move toward change at a time when education policy is evolving so rapidly.”…Read More

Curriculum Associates’ CEO Rob Waldron Appointed to the Association of Test Publishers’ CEO Council

The Association of Test Publishers (ATP), the leading international organization for publishers of assessment programs, has named Curriculum Associates’ CEO Rob Waldron to its newly formed CEO Council. Waldron is the only CEO in the United States’ K–12 education market space to be appointed to the five-person council, which will provide ongoing guidance to the ATP and its global membership.

“Rob brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the newly formed council,” said William G. Harris, CEO of the ATP. “As the Association navigates the challenges of globalization and the unprecedented disruption of a pandemic, ATP welcomes the expertise and guidance of global leaders such as Rob to help us move both the industry and ATP into the future.”

Representing leading publishers and assessment service providers in the testing industry, the ATP promotes high-quality programs among members—as well as among the entire assessment community—through highly regarded global events, advocacy work, best practices guidance documents, and networking opportunities. The ATP’s three core tasks include representing the general interests and welfare of its members and the assessment industry, providing members with current information on industry-related issues, and, when possible, establishing a unified position among members on key industry issues.…Read More

Simplify student health care management

Frontline School Health Management has expanded their offering to include COVID-19 training, tracking, data analytics and reporting for students AND staff to support and ensure the physical, mental and behavioral health, well-being and regulation compliance of the full school community as they develop plans to address social distancing, COVID-19 case tracking and more in addition to their existing responsibilities.

  • Comprehensively and easily collect health data on students, their families and school staff (e.g., symptoms, testing, immunity and other data)
  • Educate, implement and enforce practices to increase safety and reduce risk
  • Provide comprehensive tracking, reporting and oversight
  • Support mental and behavioral health issues among students

For additional information visit Frontline Education

…Read More

7 strategies to improve vocabulary instruction

Two-thirds of students in the U.S. are struggling with reading and the gap is widening, according to recent NAEP testing. Although insufficient decoding skills are typically thought to be the reason for weak comprehension skills among students, research has revealed that in many cases, an area of pronounced weakness for struggling readers is vocabulary. As a language arts teacher and learning specialist, I have been alarmed by the decline in vocabulary knowledge I’ve witnessed over the years.

Starting several years ago, my colleagues, speech-language pathologists Beth Lawrence and Deena Seifert, began questioning long-held assumptions about how students should be taught vocabulary. They wondered whether rote memorization of dictionary definitions, a hallmark of vocabulary instruction for decades, ought to be used at all, considering that these definitions often include even more unfamiliar terms, further taxing students, especially those with a language deficit.

Related content: Mindfulness instruction can make a big impact on learning…Read More

A classroom teacher’s guide to reducing test anxiety (and testing!)

As educators, sometimes it seems like all we ever do is jump from preparing our students for one assessment to another. Reams have been written about the corrosive influence of pervasive testing in education, but is there anything we can do as classroom teachers to avoid over-testing our students?

It turns out there is! We may not be able to avoid district- and state-mandated assessments, and other tests do have their place—testing is, after all, a useful way to measure some kinds of student progress—but there are a few things we can do to minimize testing and reduce the anxiety and other negative consequences of testing.

Our district and state assessments are a great measure of students’ growth, but they are only one measure. I rely greatly on observation and students’ daily work. I have often had students come to school after a rough morning at home or when they’re ill, and the results of their tests under such circumstances don’t match with what I’ve seen in class. We don’t have cookie-cutter kids, and I most definitely don’t expect cookie-cutter results.…Read More

Hold up: End-of-year testing doesn’t always carry weight

While end-of-year testing influences how teachers teach, experts caution against making major decisions about students around a single test.

A survey from Instructure, creator of the Canvas learning management system, shows that parents find end-of-year assessments only moderately effective–in fact, 66 percent of parents believe end-of-year testing is only slightly effective to not effective at all in assessing how much their child has learned and how prepared they are to move on to the next grade.

“End-of-year tests play a huge role in how teachers spend class time, especially as they wrap up the school year,” says Hilary Scharton, vice president of K–12 product strategy at Instructure. “When it comes to assessments, it’s important to remember that they can be built for different purposes, so we should ensure we’re not making high-stakes decisions about students based on a single test.”…Read More

Why combining assessments and LMS technology is essential

Assessments are more than just measuring how well students are doing in particular subjects in school, and they can actually improve student learning. In fact, frequent assessments can have a positive impact on a student’s education from kindergarten through college. While this may make some educators cringe, the reality is that test-enhanced learning, or testing as an aid to learning, has evidence of effectiveness dating back nearly 100 years (Roediger III, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2006).

Testing can help students better retain and recall what they studied, not only for the final exam, but as part of their overall educational development. This is the “testing effect,” or the phenomenon where taking a quiz can enhance later retention of studied materials, and its effectiveness has been demonstrated many times over. Students who take quizzes shortly after they study show better performance on a final test relative to students who only study without taking a practice quiz, even when no feedback is given on the quiz (Roediger III, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2006).

The testing effect, also known as retrieval practice, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning, needs a place in today’s modern learning. It can be implemented in modern learning management system (LMS) and assessment management system (AMS) technologies, like Gauge, to help improve student learning, from their first day in kindergarten to their last day of earning a university degree.…Read More

School sees massive literacy boost thanks to new assessment attitude

At the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, 82 percent of Morgen Owings Elementary School’s students were working below grade level. Now, six months later, just 40 percent are working below grade level. We have work to do, but shifting our mindset regarding assessment has made a huge impact.

We all know the purpose of assessment/testing is to gather information that will lead to improved instruction and learning. And I’m quite certain we all agree–that in some form or fashion it’s absolutely essential. But deciding which measure can and should be used to gather data for each area of elementary literacy can sometimes be daunting for administrators.

With only so many hours in a day, and days in a week how do we decide which assessments we need? Do we just test students in timed intervals–once a week, a month, a quarter? Analyze student work samples? Observe students performing literacy tasks or interview students on their readings skills? Do we administer all of these methods to collect data? How do you choose the best method for measuring reading progress?…Read More