Why Districts Need Better K-12 Assessment Management Systems

Student assessment data is essential. It helps you paint a picture of student achievement. It also shows you whether your courses and curriculum are leading to the student outcomes you want. The problem? You’ll find most of this data scattered among various systems and tools. You might go to a state department of education portal for state-level assessment data.¹ A tool like i-Ready may be the place you’d find district-wide math diagnostic data.² You might have other means to capture Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) survey data at the school level. With all these different systems, it can be challenging to get a clear view of what the National Education Association calls “the Whole Student.”

Imagine if there was a tool where you could see all student assessment data in one place. A solution to help you see an overall view of student achievement. How would such a solution support teachers and students in your school or district?

What is an Assessment Management System?

Traditionally, an assessment management system (AMS) is associated with a state education agency. For example, the Texas Education Agency provides the Texas Assessment portal to its Local Education Agencies (LEAs). These portals house data from statewide assessments such as Texas’ STAAR assessment. Other states have similar outlets for their state-level assessment data. Additionally, multi-state assessment consortiums, such as the Smarter Balanced assessment system—maintained by the Regents of the University of California—may also provide reporting tools to its participating states and districts.³

The problem with these tools? While they provide data, individual districts and schools don’t control how that data is reported or displayed. Also, it’s difficult to consolidate the multiple streams of district, school, or student data provided by these disparate tools.

Some K-12 and higher-ed organizations leverage homegrown or third-party solutions to manage their internal assessments. These can deliver standardized assessments to larger groups of students and often provide a more robust set of features, including program-level reporting, rubric development, and curriculum mapping. Many times, university IT departments create these systems for themselves. Unfortunately, these are rarely geared toward the specific needs of K-12.

How are Assessment Management Systems changing, and why?

Schools and districts are looking to see a holistic view of student achievement. Statewide assessment portals aren’t enough. To make data-driven decisions about instruction, teachers need to see comprehensive data on local summative and in-class formative assessment alongside the results from classroom assignments and statewide tests. And that data? It needs to be in one, easy-to-access place.

Building an in-house AMS is complex and carries long-term maintenance and scalability concerns. As a result, more schools and districts are turning to edtech vendors to provide AMS solutions.

A best-in-class assessment management system will provide integrated classroom technology to help educators build better assessments. These solutions help teachers deliver personalized learning and assessment so students can show what they’ve learned in a comprehensive.

As we move beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, educators need to see a complete view of student data. If they don’t have this aggregate view, it will be more difficult for them to help accelerate learning gains to overcome last year’s unfinished learning. That comprehensive view must include, at a minimum, these three big pools of assessment data:

1. State-level summative tests
2. Diagnostic assessments (often provided by a district-purchased third-party program)
3. Local benchmark tests, formative assessment, and unit quizzes

Bridging those pools of data allows educators to see trends across multiple assessment types. It also reveals discrepancies between in-class assessments and state tests, which can inform subsequent instruction and local test design. Folding in other data, such as attendance and SEL surveys, also helps illuminate the overall student data picture.

How Performance Matters Exceeds Your AMS Needs

PowerSchool Performance Matters is a comprehensive K-12 assessment management system and analytics solution. It meets and even surpasses many of the stated features and benefits of an assessment management system and much more.

As part of the Unified Classroom 2021 solution, Performance Matters brings multiple tools together to empower teachers and move education forward. Unified Classroom 2021 supports data-driven teaching and learning with integrated student assessment and reporting tools, a best-in-class K-12 learning management system, and support for special programs so that teachers are better prepared to build and deliver whole-child instruction. With Performance Matters, teachers can build and administer comprehensive assessments while students access these assessments directly in their course materials through the learning management system.

There are other excellent features as well. Teachers can score student work with custom rubrics. These have the added benefit of creating a clearer view of student progress and discouraging cheating.

Performance Matters supports performance-based assessments. These assessments go beyond the traditional assessment model to encourage students to decide how best to accomplish a task. Students can then show their knowledge, understanding, and proficiency in more authentic ways than traditional exams.

When using Performance Matters, educators will have a powerful, user-friendly, and streamlined workflow. They’ll be able to:

• Create and deliver common assessments—no more relying on third-party assessments that vendors haven’t tailored to identifying students’ learning gaps and remediation needs
• Use PowerSchool’s pre-made item banks and assessments or create their own
• Have a clear view of data trends from assessments, attendance, behavior, and SEL surveys—all on one dashboard
• Detect at-risk students and develop personalized learning experiences for them

All of these features will help students identify and address any learning loss from the COVID slide. Teachers won’t have to guess data trends from disparate data sets spread among numerous tools and portals. With Performance Matters, teachers will get a clear view of the whole student to help them guide their students to successful outcomes.

Resources

1. Florida Statewide Assessments Portal (fsassessments.org)
2. i-Ready | Assessments and Data-Driven Instruction | Curriculum Associates
3. Home – SmarterBalanced