Edmentum's Vision for Assessment Solutions

Edmentum strives to help students reach their academic goals by providing assessment solutions that identify and support individual student learning needs. We do this through valid and reliable diagnostic, interim benchmark, formative, and practice programs that produce accurate and actionable data. Guiding our vision for assessment solutions are the exciting changes currently taking place in regard to next-generation assessments.

Driven by the adoption and implementation of new college- and career-readiness curriculum standards in many states, new and more difficult math and ELA summative assessments will be taken this spring by most students in grades 3 through 11. Many students will take either the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) assessment online, both of which will employ new technology-enhanced (TE) item types.

The core of all assessments is the individual question or item. For decades in education, items have largely been true/false and multiple choice with an occasional essay item. While this is a convenient model for assessing specific knowledge, it is ineffective at measuring students’ knowledge on a deeper level. With the TE item types, the next-generation assessments will ask students to also apply and extend their knowledge, offering a clearer assessment of how fully they grasp various concepts. Schools and districts need exposure to these new item types well before the first next-generation summative assessments are administered this April to ensure that skills and knowledge are being accurately measured.

Dynamic Programs

Edmentum first introduced nine TE item types in the summer of 2013 in its Study Island product. We collected data on these items before developing the new test formats for Study Island Benchmarks and Test Packs, which were introduced in the summer of 2014.

This year, we are adding three additional TE item types:

• Drawing items
• Multiple Part items
• Video items

The ability to deliver TE items in Edmentum programs enabled the development of new national products aligned with the PARCC and SBAC assessments for the 2014–2015 school year. Edmentum will release nine new state specific and national Common Core Study Island Benchmark and Test Pack series for the 2015–2016 school year in August. Additionally, Study Island will release:

• Its industry-leading data dashboard, Edmentum Sensei, for Study Island Benchmarks and Built Tests
• Reports based on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and Bloom’s Taxonomy

Edmentum’s employees work very hard to ensure that students have access to the latest assessment innovations as early as possible. We incorporate changes to state standards and updates to how those curriculum standards are assessed sooner than any other online provider. We do all this to ensure that you and your students have the right instructional and assessment tools to implement and assess your state’s college-and career-readiness standards.