Examview Results and Reports

So... there's a lot of stuff to wade through today.






1. Big disappointment - Sharepoint was out the last couple days. So I routed my kids to review activities through Quia. But that means I can't track any meaningful Sharepoint usage data. I may keep this week anyway. But since I emailed the kids to go around Sharepoint, I won't really know whether many took advantage of this option. If I add this week, the Sharepoint numbers will look low, so if scores stay stable or even go up, it'll look like Sharepoint is inconsequential. On the other hand, if scores go way down, it will look like the lack of Sharepoint really hurt their grades when many students may well have used the online activities and still suffered grade reductions. There is a hit counter on the quia site which is at 237, but I didn't check it prior to yesterday. Well, I'm glad I had quia! I at least had some other way to get the kids their resources. But a lot of parent emails are outdated, too.



2. Speaking of Quia, I'm excited about the upgrade next week. I'll keep you up to speed on that.



3. Examview Reports. I've always liked the detail that you can get from examview reports if you code your questions well. I used to think coding the questions was a lot of tediuos work, but if you have a lot of questions with the same criteria then you can "Duplicate question" and then just change the stem. EVEN BETTER, though. I use MacroPro to go edit and code bunches of questions. So I can still use old questions that I didn't code well or other people's questions and add my codes to them. Then I get more useful reports. For example, I give a quiz weekly on the vocab, grammar, and notes that we've covered in class. In order to find out how a kid does on vocab or grammar or notes, I used to have to give the quizzes separately. Now I just call those major headings National Standards and can get a simple report like this:

Well, you can't really see that, can you? But it gives the class average on Notes, Grammar, and Vocab as well as the number of students performing above a threshold (in this case, 70%) in each area. You can also print out the names of those "in range" students who are not at or above the threshold.





But that's not all... Within any one of those "national standards" there are state and local standards. For example, in Grammar I have the state standard "parts of speech" and the local standard "nouns". But I can go even more specific than that! Using the Learning Objectives code, I can add a tag like "Common/Proper" "Singular/Plural" etc. to the nouns standard. When I run reports at any of these levels, then, I can find out who is doing how well on each specific skill. I'll print out another report you can't see. I should figure out how to do this better!




Through the haze you might be able to make out our struggles with pronouns (so many kinds!) and our peace with nouns. Once again, you can print the names of students who need more work and then you know exactly where to focus the students' energies.

But all is not perfect in Examview land. When you go to take the next step - Initiating interventions to improve performance - you hit a snag: How do you use examview to track one standard across multiple assessments? After all, if I can't easily figure out the difference in someone's scores from one day to the next, I can't measure the value of the intervining interventions (ha). I could probably export all this to excel, but I'm not working on a stats degree here! Don't get me wrong, Examview will provide a report of a student's TOTAL performance on a learning objective or standard over time (you can enter a date range and get an average across that range). But you can't get waypoint measurements to track change over time. PLEASE, PLEASE Examview listen to me on this one. Teachers want to know that our interventions work, and we need a tool that lets us measure these fairly easily. Examview has the numbers we need for this, but not the subroutines to crunch these numbers in a way that we can use.

Well, that's enough for now. Enjoy the weekend...