${loserAccounts} been merged into ${winnerAccount}.
A recent audit found these accounts to be duplicative. Addresses, order history and Q-global ordering for both accounts are now accessible via the ${winnerAccount} account. If something isn’t right, please contact us.
Blog
How do you stay up to date in your field? Our team of experts, authors, and specialists contribute regularly to our profession-specific blogs, keeping you informed of the latest industry trends, news, and innovations. Dive in below and check back often, as new content is added weekly.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of English Language Learner (ELL) students in the US rose from 3.8 million (8.1%) in 2000 to 4.8 million (9.5%) in the fall of 2015. This 20% growth in the number of ELL students prompts several important questions, two of which are, “How can we help this growing population succeed in school and beyond?” and “What tools do we need to do so?”
Language is the basis for all learning, which poses a problem when a student isn’t fluent in the language spoken in their school. Despite this challenge, ELLs are expected to meet the same standards of their English-speaking classmates, and as a result, are falling drastically behind. According to a recent study, only 63% of ELLs graduate from high school, compared to 82% of non-ELLs — and of those who graduate, only 1.4% go on to take college entrance exams.
Academics isn’t the only area where these students are running into trouble. While 1 in 10 US students are ELLs, only 7% of school psychologists surveyed are proficient (not fluent) in Spanish, 1.3% are proficient in Sign Language, and 5.3% are proficient in 27 other languages. This discrepancy is alarming as it clearly indicates an immense gap in a typical school’s ability to address these students’ diverse needs.
What are practical guidelines for serving the ELL population?
Streamline your preparations with DRA3’s online reports.
For some students, nothing conjures up greater anxiety than these three words: parent-teacher conferences. What will my teacher(s) have to say? Have I done everything I can to get a good report? Am I doing well?? Concurrently, parents have similar concerns. What will their teacher(s) have to say? Have I done everything I can to help my child succeed in school? Are they doing well? Taking time out to make sure that you have all of the information related to each student’s progress can be an overwhelming task at a time of year when their attention span is already waning with the upcoming holidays. Math grades, outcome tests, science grades, reading skills progress, social studies… the list of reports and papers is seemingly endless.
DRA3 can take care of one big item on that list — reading skills progress. Our powerful online platform gives you unlimited access to:
Class Roster Report
Student Action Plan
Student Assessment History
Assessment Instance Results
Parent Report
Student Performance Over Time
Class Skills Summary
School/District Benchmark Scoring Report
School/District Data Across Seasons (and Across Years)
What’s on the calendar for November?
One of the most important tasks in any school year is discovering each student’s literacy strengths and weaknesses. Identifying where they might need a little help, and how you can utilize their strengths to augment that support will help them make the most of their educational time. We have put together a reading assessment calendar to help you stay on track throughout the year, and to provide you with helpful tools to enhance your reading curriculum. October’s activities are crucial to your students’ reading success, and will set you on the path to discovering — and fostering — the lifelong reader in each of them!
The connections for learning, behavior, and health in a child’s brain are the most flexible when they are young, and over time, these connections become harder to change. As with any other skill, the sooner a child receives intervention for developmental delays, the better their outcomes typically are. Developmental screening is the most effective way to identify children who need further evaluation in order to get them the support they need sooner rather than later.
Developmental screening should be used to:
Identify children who may be in need of further evaluation
Assist teachers in getting to know their students’:
Cognition
Adaptive skills
Language skills
Fine and gross motor skills
Help prevent severe delays from going unrecognized
Developmental screening should not be used as:
A means to make a diagnostic decision
A school entry or readiness test
An achievement test
A typical developmental screening tool will contain items such as name, color recognition, printing letters, picture recognition, rote counting, and identifying body parts. The Early Screening Inventory, Third Edition (ESI-3) goes beyond these “typical” categories to help attain a deeper understanding of a child’s abilities.
ESI-3:
Measures visual motor-adaptive skills through block building, copy forms, and visual-sequential memory to help understand how a child can coordinate their visual capacities with their fine motor abilities.
Connects language and cognition with number concepts rather than just rote counting, and verbal expression rather than just identifying objects.
Measures verbal reasoning which enables them complete analogies, and auditory-sequential memory which enables them to recall items in a particular sequence.
Measures gross motor skills through balancing, hopping, and skipping.
Hear about the importance of developmental screening, and the power of the ESI-3 from its author, Dr. Miesels!
Plan your reading assessment activities in less time than your costume
Fall is officially here, accompanied by cooler weather, football games, apple picking, pumpkin carving, hay rides, and all of the thrills — and chills — of Halloween. Does your school allow costumes for Halloween? Are you dreading the veins-full-of-sugar Friday after? (We all are!) No matter what frights your students have in store for you this month, you can rest easy knowing that the DRA3 Reading Assessment calendar will keep you on track with your students’ literacy support.
What’s on the calendar for October?
One of the most important tasks in any school year is discovering each student’s literacy strengths and weaknesses. Identifying where they might need a little help, and how you can utilize their strengths to augment that support will help them make the most of their educational time. We have put together a reading assessment calendar to help you stay on track throughout the year, and to provide you with helpful tools to enhance your reading curriculum. October’s activities are crucial to your students’ reading success, and will set you on the path to discovering — and fostering — the lifelong reader in each of them!
Now that you’ve watched Gloria Maccow’s video answering the five basic questions about early childhood development, you might be wondering how you can identify the children in your care who may need extra support. HeadStart has provided an Early Learning Outcomes Framework (HSELOF) which presents five broad areas of early learning — central domains — which reflect research-based expectations for learning and development. The framework emphasizes the key skills, behaviors, and knowledge that programs must foster in children ages birth to 5 to help them be successful in school and life:
Cognition
Language and literacy
Approaches to learning
Social and emotional development
Perception, motor, and physical development
There are some well-known indicators for identifying children who may be at risk or need extra support.
The 10 indicators of risk:
Difficulties following directions or routines
Clumsy (gross and/or fine motor skills)
Difficulties interacting with peers
Talked late compared to peers
Slow vocabulary growth
Extremely restless and easily distracted
Poor articulation
Difficulty naming known objects quickly
Poor phonological awareness skills
Poor letter-naming skills/math skills
While some of these are typical of any young child, none should be discounted, and further screening is recommended. Using a tool that aligns with the HeadStart Framework is important to ensure you are measuring a child’s progress against a well-known and respected standard.
Early Screening Inventory, Third Edition (ESI-3) aligns with HeadStart, and can quickly identify where they may need additional support in or outside of the classroom, with reporting that can be shared with parents.
By Chris Huzinec, MS, and Anne-Marie Kimbell, PhD, MSEd
Assessment performance is rarely a straightforward process. While the tests being used have varying degrees of standardization and psychometric properties, the most effective are those that have robust reliability and validity. However, their results can be skewed by factors relating to the student, client, patient, or clinician — even the testing environment or testing process itself can affect the outcome.
Is the student being tested developmentally delayed? Do they have physical disabilities such as a visual impairment or hearing loss? Did they get enough sleep the night before? Have they eaten that day? Is there a language difference? Perhaps the tester’s physical or mental state is less than optimal, or they are unfamiliar with the testing materials.
Testing adults with fidelity can also be hampered by outside influences such as literacy, substance abuse, language, and many other factors.
Even when thorough assessment procedures are followed, conditions are present during the testing session that can affect performance, scores, and, as a consequence, test results. Being aware of these factors and their potential impact on the testing process is important to ensure maximum performance and accurate results.
The hubbub and chaos of the first days of school are behind you, and your days are filled with getting to know each of your new students. Perhaps a rogue paper airplane that landed at the foot of your desk while you were facing the whiteboard has already prompted a seating change. Perhaps the little boy who comes in each morning and rattles off random facts has inspired you to add a supplementary unit on the history of drinking straws. Perhaps you’re already planning your escape (kidding!). At any rate, whatever the first few weeks had in store for you, you are looking toward the future, and planning your next steps with your new students.
What’s next?
One of the most important tasks in any school year is discovering each student’s literacy strengths and weaknesses. Identifying where they might need a little help, and how you can utilize their strengths to augment that support will help them make the most of their educational time. We have put together a reading assessment calendar to help you stay on track throughout the year, and to provide you with helpful tools to enhance your reading curriculum. September’s activities are crucial to your students’ reading success, and will set you on the path to discovering the lifelong reader in each of them!
Tierra del Sol Middle School in Lakeside, California had a problem. Like many schools, it was struggling with how to better manage social behaviors that were adversely affecting academic performance. According to the team, there was never enough time or resources to create the necessary interventions for students. They also did not have a reliable assessment method for identifying every student that required assistance and their specific needs. And finally, they could not track students’ progress to know if their interventions were working.
David Brumbaugh, a special education teacher at Tierra del Sol, went looking for a solution and found Pearson’s Review360® in a weekly update from the Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE), an international organization that shapes policies and practices that impact the quality of education.
Review360 is a web-based behavior improvement system that includes a behavioral assessment, recommendations for interventions that map to the results, progress monitoring, and an incident reporting tool that is sortable and searchable. It provides Brumbaugh, administrators, teachers, and even parents with a data-driven method for improving disruptive social behaviors, as well as training and resources for teachers and real-time feedback and guidance for learners.
Brumbaugh credits Review360 with making him more effective in the classroom. “ I spent six years beating my head against the wall trying to expand and improve our intervention program and Pearson handed it all to me on a silver tray. It’s just fantastic. Check-In/Check-Out is the most widely referenced evidenced-based practice for multi-tiered systems of support and in my experience is simply not possible with any system except Review360.”
Tierra del Sol psychologist Sue Cradduck, agrees that Review360 helps the school to provide better service to its students: “Review360 gives us a complete view of each student’s behavior throughout the day; now we can see problematic and positive behaviors at a glance. Thanks to Pearson, we can make really great decisions based on data that’s not colored by personal opinion. It’s objective.”
Review360 was designed with teachers and administrators in mind so that they could get insight into student behavior through actionable data and connect with key stakeholders, like parents. In fact, according to Brumbaugh, Review360 has had an unexpected benefit: it has opened the lines of communication between teachers and parents with quantifiable information and solutions for in and out of school.
Joselie Horner’s son Caelan attends Tierra del Sol. She reports real change in her son once his class started using Review360. “When he has been frustrated in the past, he would just give up and say, ‘I can’t do this,’ but with Review360 and Mr. Brumbaugh’s encouragement, he is more persistent and successful in his studies.”
After years of receiving negative news about Caelan, Horner is now filled with hope. She knows exactly how she can assist her son and he is finally willing to go to school. No more morning battles. According to Horner, Caelan is now a self-starter who helps others around him. “Review360 is a game-changer for Tierra del Sol and kids like Caelan,” said Brumbaugh. “I have worked in special education for 18 years and have never been more satisfied with what we have accomplished for our kids.”
To learn more about how Review360 can help your school, read here.
