Ms. Carter is feeling overwhelmed. She knows, from the beginning of year diagnostic she administered, that many of her students’ math knowledge is not yet on grade level. She knows who these students are. And, over the first few months of school, she’s collected heaps of student work and anecdotal evidence to bolster her understanding of where students’ math knowledge soars and where it needs a lot of support. As she sits down to plan her next unit of instruction, all this data and information is swimming around in her brain, staring out from her computer screen, and sitting in organized piles across her desk.
Ms. Carter finds herself wishing she had some way to quickly identify what key skills and concepts in the upcoming unit would be particular challenges for her class, and where her class would be most successful so that she could make decisions about how to modify the pacing of the unit, which lessons to focus her intellectual prep time on to get the most impact, and how to address likely student misconceptions before they take root.
Many teachers find themselves in situations similar to Ms. Carter's. This predicament leaves teachers spending hours trying to find the best ways to help students and principals left wondering about the best ways to support their teachers.
Forward-looking, predictive data can be instructionally useful
Too often, when assessments are delivered after instruction, misconceptions have already had ample opportunity to take root and the most critical lessons, in which the misconceptions could have been tackled head-on, have passed. This leaves teachers scrambling to find whatever opportunities exist in their already-tight pacing to revisit and squeeze in previously taught content. For students, the incoherence this causes can feel messy.
In the past, predictive data didn’t feel useful in the classroom. It was spoken about as a means to label students' likelihood to perform on the state summative at the end of the year. But when we re-center teachers and students in how we build assessments, predictive data transforms from a summative indicator to a method of planning ahead that both saves teachers’ time and supports differentiated instruction.
Let’s go back to Ms. Carter’s class and see how predictive data could help her. Ms Carter is about to teach her students how to solve problems involving finding the whole when given a part and the percent. The beginning of year diagnostic said that most of the students aren’t proficient with “Ratios and Proportional Reasoning,” but she’s left wondering whether they’re relatively more or less prepared for this learning component compared to the others in the upcoming unit. Furthermore, if students will struggle with this learning component, she wonders why — what common misconceptions might her students have that could get in their way?
A high-quality instructional assessment that includes predictive data can help provide educators like Ms. Carter exactly what she’s craving. ANet sought to design an HQIA that could deliver both a look back at the performance of the students in the classroom, telling the story of student performance, and look ahead to deliver meaningful instruction with predictive data. Our new, innovative math assessment Compass Math brings that vision to life. Responses are generated in a report that is forward looking and shows teachers exactly which of the most critical learning components in their upcoming instruction are anticipated to be strengths for the class and which are predicted to be challenges.
Compass Math reports are accompanied by quick, digestible professional learning resources that help teachers understand not only what each learning component means in action, but also the most common misconception students typically have related to the learning component and how that misconception can be addressed in their high-quality instructional materials.
With this information in hand, teachers like Ms. Carter don’t have to just guess (or rely on vague domain-level reports) which learning components they’re about to teach will be stumbling blocks for their students. They know ahead of time. And when you know ahead of time, you can plan effectively.
Compass Math’s predictive data helps teachers make better use of their curriculum
In her first few years of teaching, Ms. Carter often felt like the data she received from assessments pushed her away from the high-quality curriculum her school required her to use. She would look at data reports and the curriculum side-by-side, but it was rarely clear where in the curriculum, let alone how, she could address the areas of need from the reports. Most often, Ms. Carter would end up finding teaching ideas and resources on the internet, sometimes replacing full days of instruction with these unvetted, low-quality resources.
Ms. Carter participated in well-intentioned professional learning sessions that helped her understand the math content and how to effectively implement upcoming lessons, but even when those were connected to her curriculum, they weren’t informed by data for her specific students. Ms. Carter desperately wanted to bring it all — curriculum, instruction, and assessment — so that she and her students could have a coherent experience with content that would meet their needs.
Compass Math reports are different. They make it immediately clear which learning components will need the most attention, provide brief and digestible professional learning about the content, and then tell teachers exactly where — in their specific curriculum — each learning component appears most prominently. This enables teachers to focus. Within a minute of opening the report, teachers know which lesson is the most important for addressing common misconceptions associated with key learning components.
Armed with this information, teachers are able to make pacing adjustments — allowing for more time on lessons that are projected to be particular challenges and condensing time where data indicates a class is projected to be successful; they can focus their limited intellectual prep time on getting ready for the most critical lessons, ensuring they know the activities and questioning by heart; and they can use Compass Math’s professional learning resources to internalize mistakes in student work to watch out for and proactively plan for how to address them in the moment.
Educators Deserve Data that Empowers Them to Make Impactful Decisions
When educators are given clear, actionable data that connects to their curriculum, students thrive. To learn more about our new math assessment and how it can provide you or your teachers with instructionally useful, curriculum-aligned predictive data, visit our Compass Math website.