The popular term for what's going on in the Richmond School District and other school systems throughout the region is data-driven decision making. How that plays out varies from school district to school district, from weekly meetings and annual data retreats to regular standardized assessments of student performance. What it means is educators are getting more scientific in how they approach teaching and learning in today's schools.

Use of the data for instruction is still in its infancy, according to Laura Maly, a math instructional coach who works with teachers at Bradley Tech and Pulaski high schools on applying the benchmark assessments to their classroom work. But she's optimistic that the more teachers learn about what information is available to them on their students, the greater impact it will have.

One of the main obstacles that schools say they face in taking advantage of the plethora of information available to them in the technological age is finding time for teachers to study their students' academic performance on objective measures and plan ways to address any shortcomings. In the Oconomowoc School District, each school has held a "data day" for staff before the start of school for the last four years. The Wauwatosa School District is experimenting in several schools with having teachers gather to figure out how to take information from the MAP test and apply it in their classrooms.

Online testing will require skills beyond those finely honed copying, collating and stapling skills we have acquired from our years of paper-and-pencil testing. Selecting the online assessment tool that works best for your school district can be facilitated by ensuring communication among all potential users of the application from the beginning of the selection process.

While online testing shares many of the same preparation requirements as traditional paper-based tests, they now take different forms. Rather than making sure you have enough printed copies of a test, an evaluation of the viability of online testing should involve a review of a district’s ability to provide for sufficient online access within the schedule for administration. For example, based on the number of computers and the network load, how many students can take the assessment during an exam period? Does the software restrict the number of concurrent users? Teachers likely will want the ability to create multiple forms of the test for security within the test administration. Can the application easily provide for this function?  

Further, the use of computers for online testing necessitates that students and teachers are already comfortable with using this technology as a regular part of daily instruction. Focused professional development on the usage of the application as well as what to do if things go awry will help the transition for staff. Issues to address could include what to do if a student needs to change an answer after a section of the testing is complete, how are unique log-ins provided for the students or if there is a technical problem during an administration can students resume where they were in the test.