Team Louis (Cava's Christie Louis' Class): Custom Assessments for Study Island

Hello Wonderful Families,

I am excited to announce a new resource for teacher and families! This was mentioned earlier in the year, but I wanted to provide you with more details. In past years students were assigned a Pretest and Post test in Math and Reading on Study Island. This year there are no pretests or post tests. Instead, these are called Custom Assessments. Just like the pretests and post tests, these will be taken two times a year. The good news, some of your students have completed these assessments already.

*September assessments-We will use these results to create interventions in areas of struggle.

*December/January assessments-We will look for areas where we still see struggle and continue interventions.

You may be thinking, “We just did the Scantron assessments. How is this different?” The Scantron assessments are adaptive. They show us how your student scored when given questions from multiple grade levels. The Custom Assessments in Study Island are focused on their specific grade level. We can use these results to target their grade level areas of need.

I do realize that you are asked to do a lot of “extras” (Scantron, Study Island, Custom Assessments), but rest assured that all of those things are being used to create the interventions that we provide during face to face meetings, Blackboard conferences, and small group interventions. They really do a have a purpose, and that purpose is to provide instruction to your students in the areas where they need it most.

What do you need to do?

Have your student complete the Custom Assessments in Math and Reading by Monday October 1^st.

After you have logged in to Study Island, you will see a screen that looks like this. The “ALL_4^th Grade” tab will take you to the Custom Assessment. This will cover all of the topics that will be covered this year in your grade level. This test will be difficult. Students just need to try their best. Like I said, the purpose is to find those areas that we can start targeting right now.

How do I know if my student has already completed the assessments?

After you click on ALL_4^th Grade, you will see on the right hand side whether the assessments have been completed or not started. Again, the score does not matter. You just want to see a score, rather than “Assignment not started.”

Thank you so much for your help with this. I am planning on beginning small group Blackboard interventions soon, so it is important that these assessments are completed before then.

Have a great day,