CommonLit’s School-Wide Data Reports Make Progress Monitoring Easy
By: Rob Fleisher
Tags: Students, Literacy, Teachers, Data, Education

CommonLit’s School-Wide Data Reports Make Progress Monitoring Easy

At CommonLit, we’ve created a comprehensive and engaging literacy program with over 2,000 high-quality lessons that has been proven to help students make significant gains in reading.

For SY 21–22, our team is excited to offer two packages to help schools and districts seamlessly rollout and effectively utilize CommonLit’s instructional program.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how CommonLit School Essentials PRO is designed to empower administrators by giving them data to accurately identify instructional priorities, ensure that CommonLit is being purposefully utilized throughout the school year, and measure student growth.

Administrator Access to CommonLit Assessment Series Data

The CommonLit Assessment Series is available for grades 3–12. The Assessment Series includes three specialized assessments: a Pre-Assessment, Mid-Year Assessment (optional), and a Post-Assessment. Each assessment has three grade-level reading passages and 20+ multiple choice questions.

When schools or districts purchase CommonLit School Essentials PRO, these assessments are unlocked for their team and administrators have the ability to view data from across their school or district.

To start the year, the CommonLit team strongly recommends that schools utilize the Pre-Assessment. This Pre-Assessment will allow you to see how many questions each student answered correctly and how they performed compared to their peers nationally. In an ordinary year, this data would be extremely useful to administrators. However, after a year like 2020, this data is even more critical. It will allow administrators to quickly and reliably identify students who are reading far below grade level and may be in need of additional support.

The second assessment that schools can use is CommonLit’s Mid-Year Assessment. This assessment, which is designed to be administered in the middle of the school year, is great for determining whether students are making meaningful progress. Furthermore, administrators will also receive detailed standards-based reports. These reports will make it easy for administrators to identify school-wide trends and make informed instructional decisions.

The final assessment, CommonLit’s Post-Assessment, should be administered in the final few months of the school year. This assessment can serve a few purposes. First, administrators will receive digital reports on how much reading growth each student made between the Pre-Assessment and Post-Assessment. Similarly, administrators will also be able to see how much reading growth was made by class, grade, and throughout the school. Finally, since all of CommonLit’s assessments include rigorous standards-aligned questions, it can be used as a practice opportunity for students who are getting ready to take their statewide assessment.

When schools or districts purchase CommonLit School Essentials PRO, administrators are able to have a clear understanding of their students’ ability and needs throughout the school year.

Administrator Access to Data from CommonLit’s 2,000+ Lessons

When schools or districts purchase CommonLit School Essentials PRO, administrators can also track data from all formative lessons assigned by their teachers on CommonLit. Each of these lessons include rigorous standards-aligned text-dependent questions.

First, administrators can track performance by class with CommonLit’s data dashboards. In addition to analyzing overall class performance, administrators can identify students with missing assignments and students who are struggling to perform well on assignments.

Next, administrators can track class data on performance by standard. This data will allow administrators to determine which standards classes are excelling on and where more practice is needed.

In addition to reviewing classwide performance, administrators have the ability to dig more deeply into the performance of specific students. For example, administrators can access detailed data on how each student is performing by standard. This can be particularly useful for struggling students or students with IEPs who are working on very specific skills.

Finally, administrators can see which lessons are being used frequently across their school or district and how students are performing on these lessons. This data is crucial for administrators in districts where CommonLit is a key component of their team’s curriculum or assessment plan.

Check out this blog post to learn more about some of our favorite strategies for embedding CommonLit’s lessons into your curriculum to support data driven instruction.

Next Steps

Taken together, the data that administrators receive from the CommonLit Assessment Series and from CommonLit’s formative lessons is comprehensive. It allows administrators to have a clear understanding of their students’ needs and empowers them to make decisions that will lead to student growth.

If you’re interested in learning more about how CommonLit makes it easy to track and respond to student data with School Essentials PRO, please email [email protected].