Cut to the chase note for Superintendents: To help students grow, you must know what they know
by Dr. Laine Bradshaw, PhD, Vice President of Classroom Solutions, Pearson
At a recent conference, a very wise superintendent gave me some feedback on the best way to share the innovative approach we’ve taken with our formative classroom assessment system, Navvy.
“Cut to the chase,” he said. “Just tell them Navvy is better for them because of X, Y, and Z and keep it to 10 minutes or less.”
Thank you, Dr. Franklin. And now I will attempt to do just that!
What makes Navvy better?
To begin, I’ll let Navvy speak for itself:
Sample Navvy Class report showing standards competency for each student. The check icon indicates the student has learned the standard in that column, the x icon indicates they need more support to learn the standard, and the dashed circle icon indicates they haven’t yet taken an assessment for that standard.
You might be thinking, I’ve seen lots of reports like this before. What makes Navvy better than what I’m using now?
Yes, other assessments produce similar reports, but Navvy is the only assessment system uniquely designed using validity and reliability evidence to provide trustworthy results for individual standards.
By uniquely designed, I mean we know of no other system that is doing this, or even attempting to do this. You may walk into classrooms across the country and see assessment reports with information about standards from well-known companies, but those companies are not claiming that that standards-level information they’re providing is valid and reliable to act upon.
They are giving it to you because you need it and you’ve asked for it, but the information is not what should be used to guide instruction or make standards-based mastery or competency decisions.
Navvy is a better tool to ensure that standards are being taught, learned, and measured.
Why do I need Navvy?
You need valid and reliable data on whether individual standards are being taught and, more importantly, learned.
Dr. Franklin put it this way, “We have to inspect what we expect.” If you expect teachers to teach the standards and students to learn the standards, you need trustworthy measures to tell you if those things are happening in your district. Otherwise, you will continue to get mixed messages from your local and state summative assessment data, leaving you without information to make the right decisions that translate to student growth.
Accurate measures of student competency of standards are the only way to effectively guide personalized learning, targeted instruction, and/or differentiated learning. You must know what students know to help them grow. Providing the right personalized learning supports will translate to gains on student achievement.
Without accurate, timely classroom measures of standards competency/mastery, you will waste resources of time, expertise, and money on targeted interventions for the wrong students on the wrong standards. Providing the wrong personalized learning supports will not translate to learning gains on student achievement.
A lot of well-intentioned activity to implement a strong formative assessment process (plan, teach, assess, use results to further plan targeted support, reteach, reassess, etc.) occurs in your classrooms, but if assessments tell your teachers and students the wrong information, this cycle is a costly activity without productivity.
The lack of existing valid and reliable measures for individual academic standards is why we collaborated with school districts in 2017 to create Navvy.
What is Navvy?
As I mentioned before, Navvy is uniquely designed with a strong validity and reliability argument for the diagnosis of each standard’s mastery/competency. But Navvy is also designed with the demands on teacher and student instructional time in mind.
Navvy is an online system that provides standard-by-standard classroom assessments that are:
Short (each assessment is 6–8 questions)
At the right rigor (DOK 3 questions are tough to write but key for learning what the standards require, right? We know; we’ve got you covered!)
Available on-demand (teachers select when to give which standards to which students)
Scored in real time
Easy to interpret (results are provided in real time on student, teacher, and leader dashboards)
Sometimes the hardest thing about a journey is taking the first step
Change isn’t easy. We know you may have an assessments platform that your district has used for years, and it takes effort to change the system. But gains require change! Districts who’ve made the switch to Navvy are seeing gains in their student achievement scores they haven’t seen before.
Are you seeing gains? If you’re not, we are here as your partners to make the change now to work toward the results you’d like to see tomorrow.
Change takes time to initiate, but in the end, using Navvy to guide personalized instruction, your teachers and students will save valuable time:
Creating and administering assessments (we make them and grade them!)
Organizing and interpreting data (have the insight you need in the displays you need)
Instructional effectiveness (avoid wasted time on instructional paths misguided by inaccurate assessments)
...and we fully expect you to see the same growth as our other Navvy districts.
We’d love to meet with you and your team and show you more. We’d love to journey with you.