Assessment

Assessment guides instruction in StudySync. Ongoing benchmark, formative, and summative assessments provide teachers with the information they need to help every student progress toward standards mastery. Progress monitoring and reporting tools allow teachers to easily track student gains and revise instruction according to remediation needs. Best of all, StudySync embeds scaffolded instruction and provides extra lessons so teachers have resources at the ready to meet the needs of every learner in their classrooms.

1. Screening and Diagnostic: Three important assessments guide instruction for teachers: the grade-level Readiness Screener, and the Reading Diagnostic Assessment and the Maze Fluency Assessment.
2. Benchmark Assessment: Benchmark Assessment evaluates students’ progress in standards mastery throughout the school year. Three assessment forms provide a valid and reliable measure of students’ advancement.
3. Instruction and Formative Assessment: Text questions, quick checks for success, turn and talk activities, and many other short-cycle Formative Assessments are embedded in every StudySync lesson plan to provide teachers low-stakes opportunities to monitor student performance.

   Every StudySync lesson offers students an opportunity to demonstrate progress toward standards mastery. Responding to sources, auto-graded Reading Quizzes, skills mastery checks, and longer written responses in the Extended Writing Projects all include standards labeling.

4. Review and Reteach: Each unit concludes with review and assessment. The pacing guide suggests time for teachers to revisit key concepts with which students may have struggled during core instruction and application. Review and reteaching are guided by the data tracking tools in StudySync that allow teachers to view day-to-day student performance on all standards.
5. End of Unit Assessment: The End-of-Unit Assessment reports on the outcome of student learning. As students complete each unit of the reading program, they will be assessed on their understanding of key instructional content and their ability to write in response to prompts across a series of genres.

   At the close of each instructional unit, students will be assessed on that unit’s skills in the unit assessment. The results will be used to inform grouping and additional instructional needs.

6. Data and Tracking: StudySync assessments are grounded in research, aligned with the curriculum, and designed to familiarize students with items and approaches associated with end-of-year testing.

   Data tracking and presentation tools help teachers use the results of assessments to identify which standards and skills present particular challenges for students, as well as where students are excelling and are ready for enrichment. Using the StudySync Gradebook, teachers can effectively decide how to scaffold instruction and provide remediation support for individual students.

   Tracking tools for assessments will provide teachers with a raw score as well as a breakdown of students’ performance against standards and performance against skills. In addition, color-coded reporting will allow teachers to quickly and easily monitor students’ performance and needs.

   StudySync’s Assess tab includes test banks and instant data reporting on students’ performance and standards mastery. Teachers can create, edit, and share online using the electronic test bank to customize and generate standards assessments.

Embedded Progress Monitoring

Every day, teachers have the opportunity to deepen their understanding of student’s strengths and needs through Progress Monitoring. Each lesson embeds activities across domains to ensure that students are building foundational language and comprehension skills while progressing towards mastery of reading, writing, research, and inquiry standards every day.

Progress monitoring charts appear before every text in a unit and detail which standards are covered in the text’s instructional sequence. These can be used to guide teachers toward resources for reteaching and remediation.

In the example to the right, the progress monitoring chart shows the Skill "Language, Style, and Audience" and the locations in the Angela’s Ashes instructional path where students can demonstrate learning. Additionally, it provides information on selections in future units where the skill will be revisited. Spotlight Skills will often be included in the Opportunities to Reteach column and can be applied at any time during the year to any text to reinforce a concept and provide additional practice.

Connecting Through Technology and Multimedia

The StudySync program was built to meet the needs of twenty-first century teachers and learners. Always current, the offerings on the site are changed and enhanced every day. Our original multimedia features a diverse cast of actors and voice-over actors, so that students will see and hear themselves represented in engaging, academic conversations and peer-to-peer teaching moments.

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