Happy New Year! As many people are making new resolutions for 2020, here at Edcite, we’re committed to another year of partnering with educators on assessments for learning. We’re excited to kick off this new year, and new decade, with new features developed based on feedback from our Edcite community.
New Features
Student Group Settings: Consistently Implement Accommodations
(Edcite Schools)
With Student Group Settings, you can set specific accommodations for a group of students, whether that accommodation is text-to-speech, magnified text, or another assessment setting. Setting these at the group level allows those accommodations to be available to students on every test that they take on Edcite, making it far easier to implement IEPs and needed accommodations with fidelity!
Custom Messaging for Student Reports
Teachers can now customize the directions or note at the top of the assignment report. The assignment settings already allow teachers to control whether students can see answer details or scores on the reports, this setting takes the feedback customization to the next level.
Question Previews in the Item Bank
Easily determine if you like an item in the library by expanding the preview for an in-line view. Teachers can still preview the questions in a new tab or copy the questions for editing, but this new preview will save time for quick browsing and assignment building. This is a great addition to our latest “State Released Items” filter where you can check out 15,000 released test items from around the country to build standards-aligned targeted practice.
Word & Character Counts for Essay Questions
Different end of year state tests or professional exams have tools to measure or limit the number of words or characters used in an essay response. The Edcite essay question type allows you to set whether there is a limit on how much can be typed and whether the counter counts up or counts down. Some teachers like to set a word minimum and sometimes a question requires a character limit. This is also part of our commitment to state test alignment—state tests like the MCAS have character counters and limits on open response questions.
Term Field for Classes
(Edcite Schools)
Part of the value of Edcite Schools is the ability to manage rosters across the entire school or district. Term fields have made it easier to manage the class changes and analysis of data when the term changes. This is especially helpful for teams using Clever where they may already have that term field set. It flows automatically into Edcite Schools and archives classes when the term is over—keeping teachers’ and admins’ accounts clean. 🙂
Additional Scoring Options
Edcite offers many options for advanced scoring, allowing equivalents or alternate answers, and partial credit. We also offer dependency scoring for Part A/B questions where students can’t get credit for Part B if they didn’t answer Part A correctly. One enhancement we made this winter was expanding the number of question types that offer all or nothing scoring.
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