Distance Learning and CERT Directions and tips for students using CERT assessments and remediation at home Brooke
Despite many students across the country transitioning to an at-home learning environment, CERT continues to be the simplest and best solution for empowering students to master the ACT College and Career Readiness Standards while informing teachers of needs and supporting them with lesson plans to administer virtually. This article will cover the technical side of setting up the access for at-home assessments as well as some ideas on how to best utilize CERT data when students are specifically learning virtually or in a hybrid model.
Technical Help
First, it is vital that the district IT department reviews our Systems Requirements and makes the necessary adjustments.
Next, the assessments should be enabled on assessment day.
- Select the Student tab on the top menu bar
- Assessment Access in the left column
- Select Enable next to each grade level that needs access
- Choose assessment environment of Online
- Next, choose a setting for Time Enforcement. This is a school-wide function that affects all students, including those with extended time. If selected, students will have to complete the entire assessment in the exact order seen in the ACT (English, Math, Reading, Science). Students will not be able to progress from one section to the next until the full-timer runs out. To enable this feature, which best simulates the ACT experience, make sure this box is selected. If students need to complete one section at a time without having to wait for the timer to run out, leave it Deselected. As a reminder, CERT assessments always have a timer for each section. Time Enforcement is not a setting that adds a timer to a section.
- To save changes, select Update Assessment Settings
After you have updated your assessments, next you'll need to go to the Remediation Access Panel to ensure settings are correct. We recommend not activating Remediation until the assessments have been complete by the vast majority of students.
Best Practices for Successful CERT Usage at Home
Since CERT data is standards-based and nationally norm-referenced, it's an ideal solution for providing a universal screener for students. Also, through our quizzes, teachers can continually monitor progress when it comes to both the College Readiness Standards and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Below are some ideas and tips we've compiled to help at-home learners and teachers.
- The recommendation from the CDC/USDOE is that, for in-person instruction, students travel in designated cohorts. Schools can use the initial CERT assessment as a baseline to create cohorts and the second assessment to amend those cohorts. Example: a group of 12 students only master 14% of a standard. Those students should travel in the same cohort until an individual has mastered a standard. Once the student has mastered the standard, he/she could return to virtual learning.
- If districts are using virtual content, they need to be able to ensure that students are actually learning the concepts that are being taught. CERT assessments are a great way to measure the effectiveness of teacher-created curriculum. Example: Ms. Simms designed a unit on pronouns, only 14% of her students mastered the standard on CERT assessments. Ms. Jones designed a unit on pronouns, where 87% of her students mastered the unit on pronouns. *Use Ms. Jones' curriculum.
- Use CERT quizzes as formative assessments to monitor in between Fall, Winter, and Spring assessments to gather info on where students are and where they need to go.
- Take advantage of our free standards-based lesson plans. Example: Ms. Simms sees on the Common Core State Standards Report that only 23%. of questions on English Standard L.9-10.4.b are being mastered. Using our free resource of standards-based lesson plans through our partners at BetterLesson.com, teachers can access thousands of lesson plans, many of which can be implemented virtually.