New Assessments added to the Present Levels Wizard
Pre-Academic Skills and Success Skills
The Goalbook team recently added more assessments to two sections of the Present Levels Wizard: Pre-Academic Skills and Success Skills. These areas are all about helping teachers make informed decisions about what autonomy looks like for their students at every level.
A challenge connected to both Pre-Academic and Success skills is they are concerned with developing executive function. This means the approach to assessment inherently looks vastly different from other forms of more subject-specific “academic” assessments.
Teach Students How to Be Independent Learners
Setting students up for success in these areas is about developing the skills to thrive as students and as adults. This means focusing on working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control at varying levels of autonomy.
The present levels wizard will help you identify a baseline for your students so you can classify what level of independence they are coming in on. We’ve identified an independence scale and sourced or written assessments to correspond with each level:
- Complete Assistance
- Moderate Assistance
- Minimal Assistance
- Partially Independent
- Fully Independent
Targeted Progress Monitoring Assessments
When teachers identify a student with needs at the “Complete Assistance” level, they’ll find that most of these assessments are about intentional observation. Generally, you’ll find a detailed checklist that corresponds with the skill area that you are observing, e.g. Spatial Awareness, Task Initiation, Self-monitoring, etc.
The observation sheets help teachers capture a snapshot of progress around specific behaviors with trial parameters, like the length of time a student is focused or the number of times a student attends to an important aspect of a task.
As students progress past the “assistance” levels, the assessments are more task-oriented and call for students to engage in specific activities that give teachers clear evidence of development towards autonomy. This takes many forms based on the student’s grade level and the skill area that the student is developing.
The image below is an example of a Pre-Academic Skills assessment that is targeting Spatial-Awareness at the Partially Independent level. You’ll notice that the student has to perform the specific task of sorting from start to finish rather than the general observations captured in the image above.
Prioritizing student independence is about more than simply identifying their levels — it’s about shifting our thinking about our students’ potential and intentionally tracking their progress. Our goal is always to help ALL students succeed, and this release highlights the fact that our commitment is to the whole child beyond the classroom.
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