SPMS :: Benefits
Educational experts agree that one of the most powerful ways to ensure all students meet grade-level proficiency objectives is to provide frequent common assessments to inform teaching and learning. The use of common assessments provide multiple opportunities to adjust instructional practices so all students succeed and to provide teachers with critical insight into how well students understand the standards, what changes are needed in instructional strategies, and how to best meet the needs of every student. The results of these assessments are provided quickly and they are used to plan instruction for the next day or the next week. These systems must be supported by administrators who provide time and resources for the creation of common, aligned assessments and for analyzing results and making instructional plans based on those results.
The Student Progress Monitoring System® (SPMS) allows educators to tailor common assessments at the building or district level to best serve the individual needs of teachers, students and administrators.
SPMS provides a number of benefits to schools and districts:
- Provides a low-cost method for monitoring student ability and progress across the district in reading/language arts, math, science, social studies, and writing.
- Addresses the need to create greater efficiencies in student assessment while maintaining high quality testing processes.
- Delivers immediate test results (with online and/or scanning), allowing teachers to redirect instruction to meet the needs of individual students and powerful Response to Intervention (RtI) strategies.
- Give schools tools to improve student achievement and meet AYP.
- Gives teachers more time to spend on instruction by eliminating the need to develop test items.
- Ensures high-quality test items that are used consistently throughout the district.
- Provides an ongoing "second opinion" of skills being developed by students and results can be triangulated with other forms of assessment.