April showers, May testing

This time of year, testing seems to take over the class schedule. So why add another test to the mix?

Testing fatigue is real, especially at this time of year. However, there are good reasons to have your students take the Cloze post-test in BrightFish Reading. The Cloze is an accurate test of grade-level reading comprehension that has been validated in numerous research studies over the past 30 years. It provides another data point to measure your students’ reading proficiency and see how much progress they have made from working in BrightFish Reading. The good news? It's a quick test – it takes about 10 minutes to administer – and students can access it right from the Quizzes Tile on their BrightFish dashboard.

Even if you didn’t administer the Cloze pre-test when your students started working in BrightFish, there’s still value in getting an updated snapshot of how well your students can process text at grade level. If you did administer the pre-test, you will be able to see their percentage change from their score before they began working in the program. 

Here are a few tips for getting the most from your Cloze Post-testing:

1. Confirm that the test has been scheduled. To do that, log into your Teacher Dashboard and click on Calendar in the left sidebar menu. You should see the scheduled test for your class, with a date range of 30 days. That means your students can complete their tests at any time during that 30-day period.
   
   
2. Test students who've done the work. If your students have completed less than 60 minutes in BrightFish Reading and have not finished any stories, there is less value to post-testing. The average time on task to show gains from BrightFish Reading is five hours in the program.
   
   
3. Prepare your students. The Cloze post-test is a short passage of about 200 words, with words missing from each sentence. Students choose the best word to complete the sentence from the three options provided in the drop-down list. Students should be encouraged to take their time and select the best answer. The test takes about 10 minutes, so it can be completed in a single session.
   
   
4. Keep it quiet. Use headsets so that students don't get distracted. While there is no audio during the test, headsets help to keep students focused on the task. Ideally, everyone in the testing lab would be working on the test to keep distractions to a minimum.
   
   
5. Check the results. As soon as your students submit their tests, the results will appear in your Teacher Dashboard. Click on Assessment Reports and select the class you want to review from the drop-down list. Select Cloze Post-test in the "select a quiz" field. Your summary results will appear on the page, with columns displaying pre-test, post-test and percentage change. You can also see the test responses in the Quiz Item Analysis tab. Select your class and test, then click on any of the student results to view their responses.
   
   
6. Share with students and parents.  From the summary screen, press the purple “download” button on the report. The test results are downloaded to your desktop as a csv file. You can then import the data into another report or use with any format to share with administrators and parents. 

Note: If you have other standardized testing data that you would like to compare with the Cloze test results, we would be happy to create a custom correlation report.  Contact me at sue.koch@brightfishlearning.com.