STANDARD 7: ASSESSMENT

Standard 7 - Assessment – The competent teacher understands and uses appropriate formative and summative assessments for determining student needs, monitoring student progress, measuring student growth, and evaluating student outcomes. The teacher makes decisions driven by data about curricular and instructional effectiveness and adjusts practices to meet the needs of each student.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7 - Assessment

AimsWeb is a web-based data management charting and reporting software. Our EL team uses AimsWeb to collect data for our EL students. AimsWeb measures initial sounds, letter word sound fluency, auditory vocabulary, and nonsense word fluency. This applies to standard 7 which states that teachers know how to understand and how to make data-driven decisions using assessment results to adjust practices to meet the needs of each student. The picture above is a report of one of my EL students for the fall benchmark. This records the student's performance from the beginning of the year and then compared to a normed set of data from across the country. This helps us decide where the student's strengths and weaknesses lie. This allows us to then tailor the instruction and assessment to what each student needs specifically. For example, this student needs support with letter naming fluency. Their lessons will reflect this and their assessments will be built so we can properly measure their continued progress.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7 - Assessment

WIDA ACCESS is a standards-based, criterion-referenced English language proficiency test designed to measure English learners’ social and academic proficiency in English. It assesses social and instructional English as well as the language associated with language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies within the school context across the four language domains

ACCESS stands for "Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners." It's a test that's given to students from kindergarten to grade 12, to assess their progress in learning English.

As the standard states, we use various types of assessments throughout the year including this one. This particular assessment allows us to determine a student's English language proficiency levels This then can be used by classroom teachers to guide differentiation of their assessments with accomodations appropriate for each EL student.

A student report is pictured above to the left and shows the student's results of the most recent ACCESS test. These levels will then guide us in assessment during the normal school year.

At our school, we also create student folders that we keep in our classroom so we have a convenient way of looking up data. This is pictured above to the right and contains all the important information about a student.