Assessment Data to Differentiate Instruction-A Teacher’s Perspective

If you are using Galileo, your district most likely has implemented benchmark assessments to assess student learning and progress throughout the year. Once students have benchmarked, teachers have access to assessment results that pinpoint what skills students have learned and which skills students haven’t learned. The true value of this information is the way it will allow teachers to group students for re-teaching and other types of interventions.

Most teachers will find the Benchmark Results page in the Assessment area the most convenient place to go when wanting to evaluate student assessment results. On this page, teachers will find individual student’s benchmark results communicated as a scale score. They will also see the student’s achievement level on each individual assessment (as defined by the state), and the students overall risk assessment based on all grade-level assessments given to date.

Once teachers have seen this data, it is now time to determine where the class can move on, what needs to be included in a re-teaching intervention, and what type of interventions should occur (small group or individual). At the top of the Benchmark Results page the teacher will find three reports, which represent three different ways that she can approach an intervention.

The Class Development Profile Grid
If a teacher wishes to identify which students learned or did not learn specific state standards, this is a great report to run. Teachers will often print this report out and highlight the standards that individual students have yet to learn. This informs Individual Education Plans. Those standards that most students did not master are ideal for whole class instruction.

The Item Analysis Report
It is important to examine the specific test items, and how those items represent the skill being assessed. The Item Analysis report lists how students did on each specific question. It isn’t uncommon for a teacher to notice that students struggled with one particular question. Let’s examine that particular question more closely. Is it much harder than other questions measuring the same objective? Is the question exposing students to a different way of solving a problem, than what was taught? If so, the teacher now has the opportunity to expand on her initial instruction.

Teachers also find it valuable to look closely at the question’s distractors. Determining which distractor students chose allows teachers to differentiate instruction further. The distractor a student chooses can sometimes indicate he just needs more practice, or indicates he must be re-taught an entire lesson.

The Risk Level Report
The Risk Level Report is unique in that it considers all grade-level assessments given to date. This report groups students into sets based on the likelihood they will not pass the state test. Teachers may approach an intervention by targeting students at a particular risk level. For instance, she may want to group all her Moderate Risk students together and provide them an intervention with goals that are different then the instruction she’ll provide for her On Course students. The teacher will then be provided with an intervention strategy that is unique to that group of students. The intervention strategy will list the standards assessed and organize the standards so the teacher can identify which ones to focus her interventions on.

By making use of the Benchmark Results page, a teacher has at her fingertips data that will help her differentiate instruction to better meet student’s individual needs. She can determine where she will take the whole class in terms of instruction, where she can create small learning groups and where she should individualize for students independently.

Which of these reports do you tend to gravitate to and why?

Interventions at Work in the Classroom

My ten year old came home last week with a very low grade on his multiplication homework. He was frustrated. He is a people-pleaser, has a good attitude, and works hard. Unfortunately, he still could not get his 2-digit and 3-digit multiplication problems done correctly.

I sat down with him and for the next 90 minutes took him step by step through the incorrect problems. We discovered that he was missing an entire step in his approach to the problems. We corrected the step and practiced a number of items. The next day he took the chapter test and received a very commendable 85%. He was ecstatic.

This was a great scenario with a happy ending. However, in a classroom with 30 students learning 5 subjects, it most likely would not have happened. When I was in school and I received a low grade on an assignment, I was told to go reread the chapter and do the work again. Sometimes this helped, sometimes it did not. In my opinion, interventions and reteaching needs to be tailored to help students find their mistakes and figure out how to fix them.

How can a teacher with a classroom full of students sit down and help a student pinpoint their errors? One new tool which I have found very useful is feedback based on student mistakes. One great example is shown in the graphic below.



Students typically make a few common mistakes when learning how to add decimals. Some of the most common are forgetting to line up the decimals, failing to regroup, and performing the wrong operations. The answer is extremely predictable for each of these mistakes. By connecting a feedback comment to the mistake a computer can alert the child as to where they went wrong in solving their problem. They can then correct their own work.

What kind of tools or interventions do you think work best for your children or students?

Karyn Nochumson M.A.