Discover the Benefits of Utilizing Istation’s Assessments

It’s important for educators to utilize assessment tools that identify their students’ skill strengths and weaknesses. Norm-referenced, digital tools allow educators to assess students regularly while decreasing the chance for biases to influence results.

School districts across the country use the Istation’s Indicators of Progress (ISIP™) Reading assessment to screen for the risk of dyslexia. Students in kindergarten can now be assessed for their decoding skills with the Alphabetic Decoding subtest, and norms will be provided for January through June 2022. Teachers and schools will now have norms based on a representative sample of all students in kindergarten.

Istation’s standard scoring criteria will remain in place. Scores will only be reported for students who receive the Alphabetic Decoding subtest based on their performance. If a score is required for other students for screening, teachers can administer an On Demand assessment.

Students receive Istation’s monthly assessments automatically at the beginning of each month the first time they log in to the program. Teachers can give the assessment more often if desired and can use the monthly tests as benchmarks or as continuous progress monitoring tools.

Istation Customers: Click here to discover more about this update and ISIP assessments.

3 Benefits of Utilizing a Norm-Referenced Assessment Tool

Whether you’ve been using Istation for a while or are new to the program, you may not have realized all of the benefits that come with using a norm-referenced assessment tool. Check out these 3 that are readily available and offer a much more robust measuring tool for assessing classroom students. 

Schools need to measure students’ skills regularly to see if interventions and classroom instructional strategies are working. With norm-referenced assessments, educators get accurate results showing how individual students, whole classes, or campuses are performing compared to others. Istation automatically assigns a monthly assessment to each student (unless otherwise specified through the ISIP Configuration Settings), making progress monitoring easy. 

2. Norm-referenced adaptive assessments will adjust based on student responses to test questions to precisely measure student ability within subtests.

Not all learners master skills at the same pace: one student could be advanced in spelling but struggling with fluency while another student could be the exact opposite. With a norm-referenced adaptive assessment tool, students are able to work at their own pace through assessment questions. Test questions range from easy to difficult and adapt as the student progresses. Istation’s assessments measure skills based on predetermined Common Core and state standards. Read more about the benefits of providing adaptive technology to early learners here.

3. Norm-referenced assessments like ISIP offer a measurement scale that aligns student performance levels with an instructional tier or level.

Another great thing to keep in mind when considering norm-referenced assessments is the scale they can provide to educators. Working with groups of students has never been easier when your assessment tool measures and groups students for you. Whether you are using instructional tiers or levels, Istation’s assessments provide data based on individual student performance. Classroom educators can use these data to inform instruction and plan for students’ individual strengths and weaknesses.

Be on the lookout for more exciting news about changes in Istation’s programs in 2022!