[Administrator Tips] Proactive Online Credit Recovery Aligned to MEIRS

The first semester of any school year means that counselors are busily meeting with students, reviewing their progress toward graduation, and working with them to plan for life after high school. And, for some educators, the focus now shifts to groups of students who may need extra support getting across the high school finish line to graduation in just a few short months. These students may have fallen behind on credits in key core classes or need additional credits in elective subjects to meet state and local graduation requirements. Online credit recovery is a great way to help students proactively earn the credits they need to graduate with their cohort.

Let’s explore some online credit recovery practices through the lens of the Minnesota Early Indicator and Response System (MEIRS), matching strategies and approaches to some of the steps of the system.

Likely, your school team has already defined a group of students who would benefit from online credit recovery, a key first step for the MEIRS response. Schools know they want to provide credit recovery opportunities that offer a high-quality educational experience equivalent in rigor and content to traditional courses. Here are five ways that a digital curriculum can help provide a high-quality credit recovery experience, in conjunction to MEIRS and Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring Systems (EWIMS).

1. Use Flexible, Adaptive Programs Supported by Data

Flexibility is important. Some students may have the need to repeat an entire course. In this instance, program administrators should look for online courses that are competency based and that also give individual schools or districts the ability to set the standard (based on local policy) for achieving credit.

Other students may demonstrate competency, achieve passing marks in a significant portion of a course, but not complete enough of the course to standard so that they can earn credit. In this case, educators should seek out online courses as well as data paired with the program that are easily customized so that students only need to complete the specific units of study in which they were not successful during previous attempts in the course. 

2. Address Individual Student Needs

An effective digital curriculum provides different tools to help support meeting the individual needs of every student. Educators should seek out a program that gives them the ability to easily build tailored courses that include the exact units that a student needs to master for credit. It’s imperative that educators have the ability to customize content within an existing course, pull in units from other courses as needed, and add their own content to a course (in case there are specific projects or assessments that are common practice for all students).

3. Assign Interventions

Not sure what portions of a course a student has mastered and what units need to be recovered? Having access to built-in preassessments that take the guesswork out of building a custom course will ensure that all parties use their limited time wisely. Students can take a pretest, and based on their mastery of concepts, a digital curriculum should provide the ability to exempt the students from the units in which they demonstrate mastery and assign the remaining units for completion.  This way, educators can be sure that students are learning the content they need but aren’t being overloaded (or disengaged) with studying content they’ve already learned.

4. Monitor Student Progress

Know exactly how students are pacing with powerful data views that give you unmatched visibility into pacing, progress, and performance. With our courses, you will never wonder if students are behind, ahead, or right on target with their goals. It also becomes easier to communicate student progress when you have actionable data readily available.

5. Evaluate, Refine, and Report

We know that the reality is that the work is never done. But, with a solid approach and commitment to always keep improving, your students and teachers will surely experience success within the school year and beyond with the MEIRS framework: identify unit and credit recovery needs; deliver high-quality, individualized instruction; monitor progress frequently; make data-informed adjustments.

Edmentum partners with schools and districts across the country to provide an online learning experience aligned to MEIRS by providing rigorous and engaging content and making unit and credit recovery engaging and attainable so that your students can get back on track to graduation. Using Courseware for credit recovery also provides a great experience for educators, with a user interface that makes it easy to provide customized content for students, set goals for course completion, and track students’ progress and pacing to ensure that coursework is completed on time. 

Want to find out more about how Edmentum’s online solutions can support flexible learning and credit recovery to improve graduation rates? Check out how these five schools and districts are implementing Courseware in innovative ways! 

Also, be sure to check out an upcoming in-person event for Minnesota educators, State-Approved Alternative Program Credit Recovery Options – Identifying Best Practices for Implementation, taking place on December 4 from 1:00–3:30 p.m.