My school district uses Edmemtum, a learning platform that has many different programs, to assess individual student progress throughout the year. In light of COVID-19 and the learning gaps that my students were returning to school with, a virtual learning platform seemed to fulfill our needs and make the most sense. Edmentum has two programs we have previously used, including Study Island and ExactPath. Study Island is a grade-level performance assessment tool where students are assessed at their grade level on different skills that they need to work on, whereas ExactPath assesses students where they are, regardless of the grade they are in. For example, I teach juniors and seniors who read, on average, between 3rd and 5th grade level. In this case, students take a Reading, Math, and Language Arts diagnostic that assesses their readiness for different skills in each of the areas and composes a "Learning Path" for them. Each learning path is comprised of at least three different skills depending on the subjet area and concludes with a "progress check" that asesses students on mastery of all skills they learned throughout the path to see which have been transferred to application/long-term memory.

Randel (2018) finds that students "who use Exact Path and complete at least eight lessons as assigned by Exact Path will make statistically significant gains in achievement relative to students who do not complete any Exact Path lessons". Statistically significant gains were identified as "ranging from 0.07 to 0.19 and improvement indexes ranging from 2.79 to 7.53" (Randel, 2018). In terms of my own experience with this platform, my students are working on their reading and language arts learning paths on Monday of each week of the term. We test students with the same diagnostic they took in the beginning of the year again in winter (December) and spring (April). For the past several years, I have seen students improve their national percentile ranking (NPR) score from the lowest percentile (0-25th) to the highest (75-100th) for each grade level I have taught, with an average of 30 points of growth between each testing session.

My main highlight of this assessment tool is the fact that it allowed me to individualize my instruction and intervention for each student depending on their needs. Whether one student is on grade level or another right next to them is several grade levels behind, I can provide targeted intervention and/or enrichment regarding the same skills we are using in class, but at a level that allows them to feel some sense of success and mastery. 

References: 

Randel, B. (2018). Impacts of Edmentum's Exact Path on Student Reading Achievement. Online Submission. Chicago