Assessments

Compass Points Ensure Your Students Acheive Positive Academic Outcomes

Calvert’s Compass Points provide a suite of assessment tools that ensure your students achieve positive academic outcomes. Our robust Student Information System (SIS) features attendance tracking, auto-graded assessments, and other important documentation for the academic team to use in guiding a student’s course of study. As a superintendent, you will also appreciate that all student records can be merged and exported in standard formats for reporting AYP gains and other student demographics and statistics.

Once the student and Learning Guide are well into the instructional voyage, then the teacher and administrators should be monitoring the student’s progress and intervening as warranted either with remediation or enrichment and extension.

We have developed a series of Compass Points to check the student’s direction and to correct the course when the data indicates the need.

In line with Calvert’s mastery learning emphasis, we have written daily assessments and monthly tests.  You may choose to monitor more often.  The most effective implementations, we have found, monitor the students weekly and quarterly as well.  We highly recommend that the teachers develop a system of monitoring so that the student is not allowed to get too far on his own without some sort of contact with the teacher.

These items will help track your student progress in the Student Information System.

Daily CheckPoints

We begin with the daily CheckPoints, a set of 3-5 questions in most subjects.  In most cases the checkpoints test the major concepts in the lessons.  We are continually refining them to be most effective.

The daily CheckPoints also serve as an attendance tracking system.  When the student completes at least one set of checkpoints, that day is highlighted on a calendar.  We have also developed a traffic light system to show the mastery level of the each assessment.

Daily Attendance Tracking

This picture below shows a snapshot of an attendance calendar from the Student Information System to show when a student has completed checkpoints.  We encourage you to require or strongly persuade your students to complete the checkpoints after each lesson to give the teacher an idea of mastery.

Daily Pacing

This picture below illustrates a student’s pacing chart.  Your teacher will be able to see if the student is pacing reasonably.  If a student is stalling or moving quicker than recommended, the teacher should be calling or emailing the student and Learning Guide to find out what is happening and how they can offer assistance.

Daily Progress

Depending on the score that a student achieves on the Checkpoint, mastery level is indicated by a green, yellow, or red light.  80-100 percent indicates sufficient mastery that the student is ready to move forward.  A yellow light indicates partial mastery (60-79%) which warrants monitoring.  If a student receives a lot of yellows within a span of consecutive lessons, it would be wise for the teacher to pick up the phone and offer assistance.  If the student receives a red light (below 60% mastery), we recommend immediate contact so that the student is not allowed to move on to future lessons without some intervention.  A series of reds might indicate a need for a course correction.

Daily Check for Understanding

This image shows an example of a Checkpoint in Grade 6 Math. 

You see that this student had 1 point out of 3 correct, so this Checkpoint would show red on the student progress page.  He does not seem to understand equivalent fractions well enough to move forward.  He may benefit from an extra tutoring session.  If your Supervising Teacher does not have time in her schedule, then you can refer the student to an Education Counselor who will work the student through the concepts.