Formative Assessment

“I think one of the simplest features—that’s nice for teachers with Study Island—is simply the fact that students have access to all the standards,” said Mr. Krause. “It really allows a teacher to be able to assign tasks and create assignments unique to a students’ readiness.”

Every time you give students an assessment, you expect to see a series of output measures that will help inform critical academic decisions. Maybe you’re focused on growth.

Whenever we use instruments to measure things, whether it’s a yardstick to measure height, a clock to measure drive time, or a test to measure student ability, there is some amount of noise that can result in slightly different measurements each time. That noise is called measurement error. In educational testing, this measurement error is more often referred to as the standard error of measurement—abbreviated “SEM.”