Exact Path Back-to-School Planning Guide

Pretty soon, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and crisp spiral notebooks will be in the air as students once again head back to school! Whether you’re kick-starting a new Exact Path implementation or reigniting an existing program for the new school year, we want to make sure that you have what you need to satisfy any and all flexible learning environments. Check out our resources for preparing your Exact Path account, gathering implementation best practices, exploring our favorite features of the program, learning from other successes, and take discovering new enhancements arriving just in time for the 2021–22 school year.

Prepare Your Account for the New Year

There are a few initial steps you should follow to get your implementation off the ground. Our wonderful consultants and on-call support representatives can guide you through this process, but with the help of some how-to resources, you can also do it yourself. Start by taking the following actions using the short videos available on the Exact Path Getting Started Resources page.

1. Update your teachers, classes, and users: Each school year ushers in new educators, new students, and of course, new classes. While admins can adjust teachers and students in the system from the Administration Center, individual teachers have the ability to create classes. We also encourage educators to archive old classes to safely remove from them view without risk of losing any historical data.

2. Set your academic year and test windows: Before you can get your students into Exact Path, administrators must first make sure that the new academic year is defined and test windows are set. If you have a multiple assessment account, follow these steps. Academic years allow you to group all data together to compare growth and progress throughout the year. Test windows sit inside an academic year to define when expected assessment administration should occur. The settings area provides a friendly walkthrough of this process for administrators. This process looks a little different if you are using NWEA MAP Growth data or Renaissance Star data to build learning paths.

Gather Implementation Best Practices

Our in-house research scientists, subject-matter experts, and consultants have gathered lots of great insights throughout their tenure here at Edmentum. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of information to help guide your program implementation.

5 Tips for Administering the Exact Path Assessment: After your account is set up, it’s time to administer the assessment. Check out these quick tips to increase the validity of the assessment results.

Teachers’ Top Tips for a Successful Exact Path Implementation: Discover tried-and-true tips from our panel of educators who use Exact Path.

Creative Ideas from Fellow Teachers to Build Your Exact Path Contest: Explore tips from educators across the nation, and dive into resources in our contest toolkit for ultimate engagement success.

Explore Our Favorite Features

Turn your Exact Path implementation up a notch by taking an in-depth look at key program areas, combined with quick tips to success.

Diagnostic Assessments: This blog post and accompanying video discuss the value of the Exact Path diagnostic and examine how it works. If you’re still deciding on your preferred benchmark tool, check this out to learn more.

Individualized Learning Paths: This resource will help you unpack the ins and outs of our automated learning paths, including what lesson components your students can expect to find, what automatic remediation is in place, and what level of insight you can expect to get as an educator.

Trophies and Challenges: Exact Path offers meaningful engagement features that can help crank up student motivation. Make sure that you know how they work to support skill mastery and time-on-task—then download some of our free student and class trackers!

Assignments: The individualized learning paths are a critical component of the program, but assignments also provide an important means by which to remediate, accelerate, or simply focus on a specific standard exactly when you need to. Learn more about how they can be used in Exact Path.

Knowledge Map and Current Activities Data Views: Monitoring progress in the learning path is critical to implementation success. Check out this video to make sense of your reporting options and capture ideas to take advantage of each report for more targeted instruction.

Learn from Others’ Success

We frequently have the honor of hearing from our terrific customers across the United States, and we’re always proud to share their stories. Learn from educators who have been able to successfully use Exact Path to support continuous learning in the wake of a difficult school year.

“It was also eye-opening for those teachers who might not have been using Exact Path as much at the beginning of the school year to say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, these students are really growing; maybe I need to start.’”

—Matia Goodwin, Principal at Camden Elementary in Kershaw County School District, South Carolina

“Even though we have some students that are working two or more grade levels below [their current grade level], we were able to see growth from where they started with diagnostic one to diagnostic two, just from them getting that small-group instruction, working on their learning paths, and teacher support.”

— Erin Rineberg, K–8 Coordinator at California Pacific Charter School, California

Stay on Top of What’s New

We’re constantly improving our programs based on your feedback. With this July’s release, it’s clear that exciting features and functionality are not in short supply!

• Exact Path 2021–22 School Year Enhancements Find sneak peek videos and read more about all of the exciting enhancements available this year.

This post was originally published June 2019 and has been updated for the 2021-22 academic year.