Your End-of-Year 3-Month Exact Path Strategy for Success

We have hurdled over the halfway point in the school year, and spring testing season is soon upon us. How are you focusing these remaining months of instruction to make them the most meaningful? 

We can look to Exact Path, Edmentum’s K–12 diagnostic-driven, individualized learning program, to help us understand our students’ strengths and remaining areas of growth to bolster our students’ learning. In this blog post, we’ll break down a three-month timeline to explain how to make the most of the program for a successful second half of the school year.  

3 Months Prior to End-of-Year Testing

You’ve finished your winter readministration of the Exact Path diagnostic to check in on individual growth, and now you’re flush with data to set a plan into motion. Let’s dig deeper into the data you have at your fingertips, starting with class diagnostic reporting. 

Have you checked out and made use of grade-level proficiency (GLP) yet this school year? This classification of readiness will help answer: “Are my students tracking toward end-of-year grade-level expectations relative to winter and spring expectations?” Now is a wonderful time to check in and gauge how your whole class is doing, as well as really focus on small groups and individual students.  

For individual students of all readiness levels, the Learning Path Entry Grade (LPEG) level is another important metric to provide great insight into where in the new learning path learning will start.  

Combine the two, and you may find that you have a student who meets or exceeds expectations, as determined by overall GLP, but then scan over to LPEG, and that the same student has a domain or two listed below grade level. Not only will this clarify where the learning path will start, but it’s a great indicator of where an additional assignment for that student for extra reinforcement of the skill(s) within that domain could be effective.  

Check out the additional printable resources available to use with your students, or use the Assess & Teach tool to review a lesson with a group and have the students complete the mastery quiz on their own to provide you with further data around their progress. Model critical thinking and test-taking strategies for your students during this reteach and remediation. Not only will students receive instruction on focused skills, but they will also be building the skills and stamina necessary for success on their end-of-year tests.  

Use these guided questions to drive your work with your students during this phase:

• What are the power standards you know will be heavily assessed on your end-of-year state assessment? What skills do they correlate to in Exact Path? When we dig into the data, what observations can we make regarding students’ readiness levels related to the skills we know will be assessed?  
    
• How can you intentionally create small groups using LPEG data to increase learning and bolster student achievement?  
    
• How can you optimize Exact Path instructional time and routine within class time to provide a balance of individualized learning path time with small-group and one-to-one skill-specific intervention?  

2 Months Prior to End-of-Year Testing  

We made great headway using our diagnostic and learning path data. Now it’s time to turn up the heat!  

Complete a check-in with your students’ learning path data in the Knowledge Map, and take the time to ensure that students see the R&R of Exact Path—the results and relevancy! You may want to share their progress with them on assignment scores, Trophies earned, and time spent learning on their paths. When students see the relevance of spending time and connect it with their learning outcomes, excitement will follow!  

Review your data from the assignments area. Are your students ready to tackle those skills at the 4th grade level? Celebrate their progress with them. Perhaps you have some students who aren’t quite there, so continue to focus on small-group instruction with them over this month.  

Use these guided questions to drive your work with your students during this phase:

• What successes have students made over the past month?  
   
• How have you communicated with students regarding their progress and learning leading up to end-of-year testing?  
   

• What skill gaps still exist within your classroom of students?  
   
• What skill gaps have your students closed?  
   
• Who are those students needing further remediation, on-grade-level material, or extensions?  

1 Month Prior to End-of-Year Testing  

Remember all those power standards you taught your students back in September, October, and November? Review those concepts using the Exact Path Assess & Teach tool. By providing on-grade level lessons to students, you are building in the opportunity for students to use the instructional resources within Exact Path to engage and refresh students of key grade-level skills!  

Now, think about using the Skills Performance report within Exact Path. This report provides great insight into students’ readiness as it relates to grade-level skills and standards. You can easily see the percentage of students who have assessed above and below on key grade-level skills, as well as those who are working on those skills in their current learning path. This report provides you with a global breakdown of the readiness levels of students in your classroom, and it is also a great tool to bring to grade-level meetings and professional learning communities (PLCs).  

As students are engaged in their grade-level assignments, check in with small groups and individual students. Which students might be struggling with the grade-level concepts and need some personal attention and encouragement? 

Use these guided questions to drive your work with your students during this phase: 

• What skills did you teach at the beginning of the school year that you need to give additional review?  
   
• What is your classroom-level data telling you? Where do you see trends in domains and skills within math, reading, and language arts that need further reviewing?  
   

• Which students are you going to check in on to provide intentional academic support and encouragement as you prepare for the grade- level standards-based assessments?  

Post End-of-Year Testing Season  

You did it. You put in the work. Your students put in the work. It has been a year!  

As you await end-of-year assessment results, you can leverage your Exact Path diagnostics to gauge how students have done this year. This is the true celebration of growth. As you think about your final diagnostic administration, you want to be strategic. Give students a little breathing room from that high-stakes state assessment before administering the final diagnostic. This will avoid testing fatigue, and students will surely appreciate that!  

Once you administer that diagnostic, you can revisit students’ growth in terms of their GLP, LPEG, and national percentile rank (NPR)—which compares student performance to a nationally normed sample of learners assessed in the spring. Additionally, this will provide you with valuable instructional input. How can you use data to make crucial instructional decisions for summer learning and the next academic year?  

Use these guided questions to drive your work with your students during this phase: 

• What growth did students make this year, and how can you communicate and celebrate that growth with your students?  
   
• What is your data telling you about instructional areas that are strong, as well as areas of improvement?  
   
• How can you use the data to organize and plan for summer learning opportunities?  

Want to learn more about finishing the year strong with a data-driven instructional approach? Check out this blog post on 5 Things You Should Know About Interpreting Your Exact Path Assessment Data.