Resource Name: Edulastic
Uses: Quiz Quickly, Construct Meaning, Read and Respond
Teacher Time Investment: IIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Student Learning Curve: IIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Description: Edulastic is an online assessment application similar in look and feel to PARCC assessments. Hopefully that doesn't scare you off immediately! It's incredibly flexible in its use, and produces well organized data from your assessments.
Once registered, you can select from publicly shared assessments (many of them with texts attached) or create your own. When choosing response options, you can select from a diverse collection (see image to right).
Unlike what students might experience on the PARCC, I would recommend creating shorter rather than longer assessments in order to maintain focus on task.
An overview of the site appears below:
Sample Applications for the Classroom:
- Nearly any kind of content could be embedded here for more traditional assessment purposes. While performance based assessments are perhaps more engaging, we as teachers should occasionally still expose students to what they're likely to see on standardized testing.
- Short writing samples could be assessed through this site, as grouping results from ongoing measures will help you see if students are making expected progress.
- Since Edulastic's curated content is aligned with the Common Core Standards, this is a terrific site to conduct formative assessments with students as the data tools will allow you to see at a glance if all students meeting individual goals. More importantly, this same information will help you decide where to orient future instruction in order to help students all students grow.
Notes and Caveats:
- It's tempting to build a behemoth assessment through this site. Resist that temptation. Short, frequent skills checks are all you need if the questions and prompts you provide are zeroed in on the standards you intend to assess. Additional questions meant to "fill out" the quiz or to increase the likelihood (percentage-wise) that students will score well do not help you determine acquisition of a standard. For example, an assessment on summarizing and drawing conclusions should not be cluttered with questions about vocabulary or character motives. Additionally, the two skills mentioned (summarizing and drawing conclusions) should have their particular questions coded to different standards, so that the resulting data reads correctly as two discrete skills, rather than a lumped score generically called something like "reading comprehension."