Learn How Carmen Overcame Challenges of Delivering District Wide Benchmarks
Carmen School of Science & Technology needed a digital delivery method for its benchmark assessments. Not only did they need a digital delivery method, but a platform/system that provides reports based off the information collected through the platform. Their teachers needed something that was easy to use from an administration stand point and even easier from a grading stand point.
In order to solve the distribution of benchmark assessments, Classify Learning needed to understand the technical capability of Carmen. Throughout the conversations, it became extremely clear that Carmen was an extremely tech-savvy district that loved to embrace technology to solve problems. Our first goals was to train their staff on the Classify Learning platform and partner with them to continuously improve the platform to support their workflow for their teachers and staff. We also focused on how we delivered testing to their students. While a majority of tests where taken through a typical digital means, Carmen need the capability to support paper to digital assessments(bubble sheet scanning) and the ability to use locked-down browser with district-issued Chromebooks.
Step 1: Understand the Desired Testing Strategy
The first step of our process with Carmen, is to understand the goals they are trying to achieve with the Classify Learning platform. We had a number of meetings with stakeholders from the district and leaders within various school sites. Part of this step is to make sure the testing material lines up with the standards they are trying to report on. Finally, from a technical perspective, we wanted to make sure our Chromebook kiosk mode locked browser was developed and deployed in a way to make it easy for their IT team to roll it out to their students.
Step 2: Develop a Roll-out Plan for Admins and Teachers
One of the more important steps in the process is making sure teachers and admins are trained on the Classify Learning platform. We worked through various training modules to have short yet impactful training sessions for a few groups teachers and admins. Once the training was completed, those teachers and admins had a higher level of confidence when working with the platform to administer an assessment and grade manual responses. We also documented common workflows within the platform for teachers and admins to look back on if they ran into a problem.
Step 3: We Have Data, Now What?
After testing 1000s of students through benchmark assessments, we worked closely with the Carmen data team on how to read through a lot of metrics collected during the testing process. We reviewed some of the single assessment pre-built reporting and then progressed to chatting through some of our multi-assessment pre-built reporting. The individual assessment reporting definitely foster conversations for a specific testing period, but the really impactful conversations were around growth and reviewing the multi-assessment reports. Carmen was able to compare the start of the year goals and see how the metrics collected either supported the initial goals or identified areas of growth for next year.
Step 4: What's Next?
Because Carmen is so technology focused, we wanted to partner with Carmen to see how we can continue to improve the platform to help them attain their overall goals. A few times a years, we would meet with various leaders within the Carmen district to discuss pain points and successes that they have experienced throughout the year. We come up with a few action items that Classify Learning can execute on to bring a positive impact to Carmen within the current school year or looking towards the next school year.
Assesments
Elevate your assessments with our platform's 50+ item types and advanced technology for better interactive assessments for students.
Reporting
Get insights and analyze data with ease through our sophisticated reporting tools. We help you make better data-driven decisions.
Diagnostics
Get insights into student performance with our Math and ELA diagnostic assessments powered by Classify Learning's diagnostic engine.
LMS
Transform your classroom with our LMS for seamless curriculum management, student tracking, and engagement.
Custom Work
Realize your goals with Classify Learning's custom software development. Our team brings your ideas to life on a flexible platform.
Once the Classify Learning platform was set up for Carmen, they were able to deliver benchmark assessments to the majority of their student body. Not only that, they were able to effectively rollout a locked browser strategy for their Chromebooks. Once the assessments were done, they were able to organize data meetings to discuss the results to make follow up decisions about the educational growth of their students. Furthermore, they were able to export raw assessment data and use it with external datasets to further their coaching conversations with their teachers.
It has allowed us to support teachers and administrators in administering strong assessments and using data consistently to monitor progress. Classify staff have been very responsive to our needs and have implemented several improvements to the platform based on our feedback. This has allowed us to improve the roll out of the platform and increase usage and adoption.
