The Key to Personalized Learning? Personalized Assessment
More and more K-12 educators are personalizing instruction. In fact, 99% of those surveyed in December 2021 said they were shifting more to personalized learning.
Assessment plays a crucial role in personalized learning. After all, you need to know what a student has learned before you can determine where they need further instruction.
But many schools haven’t fully leveraged assessments. The most effective assessment tools don’t just measure academic knowledge and progress. They also give educators and caregivers insights into the whole child.
Just as you can personalize instruction, you can — and should — personalize assessment.
Personalizing Assessments
Districts invest in assessments for many reasons. The most obvious involves measuring and monitoring students’ academic progress. Districts need to know where students stand in relation to goals and what areas of learning require further development. This is where formative, interim and summative assessments come in.
But the most effective assessment systems go beyond these core academic functions. They also guide you in addressing students’ academic, behavioral and social-emotional needs.
For example, your assessment tools should enable you to:
- Screen students for learning differences like dyslexia.
- Identify gifted and talented students.
- Screen for behavioral and social-emotional deficits, allowing you to identify effective interventions.
In short, you need valid, reliable and fair assessments that allow you to support the whole child.
Real-time data is another imperative for every stakeholder in a student’s learning journey. You need the ability to easily access and analyze assessment results. Up-to-date data allows you to decide on next steps, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and adapt supports.
Unfortunately, too many assessment tools become a burden on administrators and teachers. Assessments can take up a lot of time. Educators might lack visibility into the results they need. The data may be difficult to understand or irrelevant to personalized instruction. All these problems make informed decision-making much harder.
Enter the Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite
The Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite overcomes these problems and gives educators the capabilities they need to help all students reach their full potential.
Pearson has been a leader in the assessment field for more than 80 years. K-12 districts across the country turn to Pearson for its high-quality, research-based instruments.
The Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite offers a broad portfolio of screening, assessment, intervention and progress-monitoring tools. The suite of assessments supports educators, caregivers and students in improving educational outcomes. Designed to pinpoint where students need support — in real-time — the suite includes:
- Academic skill-based screeners and progress monitoring tools to support MTSS/RTI programs
- Screening and progress monitoring for behavior/social-emotional learning
- Screeners for early literacy, dyslexia, and gifted and talented
- State-standards-based measures and instructional resources for interim and formative purposes
- Incident management for schools and districts
The Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite offers the best analytics, personalized data and communication tools. These features give administrators and teachers the data they need when they need it.
The assessments are modular, too. Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite works at the district, classroom and individual levels. This flexibility allows school leaders and educators to choose which tools best meet their needs.
How the Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite Works
To see how the suite supports the whole child, consider some of its elements:
1. Academic Screening and Progress Monitoring
Serving students from pre-K through grade 12, aimswebPlus™ screens and monitors reading and math skills. This nationally-normed tool uncovers learning gaps and identifies students who may be at risk for academic success. It lets you assess growth at the individual and classroom levels.
Significantly, aimswebPlus gives you valid and reliable insights about specific learning targets. Its progress monitoring assessments target specific skills students need to learn so that educators can monitor the effectiveness of interventions. This tool also links to instructional resources to support growth in reading, writing and math skills.
Add-on measures allow you to screen for dyslexia and for underlying factors that can contribute to social, emotional and behavioral issues. Most aimswebPlus assessments take only one to four minutes to complete. A wide range of education personnel can administer and score them.
2. Behavior Screener
Review360® is configurable and comprehensive allowing you to identify students in need of assistance through school climate, mental health and or social wellness universal screening, analyze classroom behavior, staff responses and consequences through incident management all while empowering you to identify effective interventions through behavior plans. Make more informed decisions with the real-time data in your dashboard. Review360 promotes equitable practices and reduces disproportionality in discipline.
This tool boasts an on-demand professional development library to help teachers support students. Review360 also enhances communication with families about students’ academic, behavioral and social-emotional growth.
3. Gifted/Talented Screener
The Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test®, Third Edition (NNAT®3), helps identify K-12 students with the potential for advanced scholastic achievement. This nonverbal assessment of general ability is ideal for use with a diverse student population.
As with other Pearson Assessment for Learning Suite tools, a variety of educators and support staff can use NNAT3.
4. Formative Assessment
Navvy is an essential tool for making personalized learning of your state standards a reality. This standard-by-standard classroom assessment system gives you real-time, actionable and accurate results. It shows you where each student needs more instruction before moving on to the next standard. Navvy’s laser-focused learning evidence guides you on how to support each student. Navvy assessments are concise, too. Each contains only six to eight questions, saving time for teachers and students.
Not sure what to do next? Navvy includes instructional resources to support individual, group and whole class instruction.
Students at schools using Navvy have shown strong learning gains in both math and English language arts (ELA) and are now also available for science and social studies.
5. Interim assessment
How do you identify student progress before they get to summative assessments? The Pearson Review of Progress and Learning (PRoPL) gives you a powerful tool for interim assessment.
PRoPL is configurable to any set of state standards. Each assessment takes only about 30 minutes and provides an accurate view of student progress in ELA and math. ProPL also forecasts where each student is expected to be at the end of the year, leveraging only on-grade, high-quality, summative-like test questions. With that insight, you can tailor instruction leading up to the summative assessment.
Combined with Navvy, PRoPL creates a system of standards-based, accurate and reliable formative and interim measures of student performance throughout the school year.