How does Checkology measure student growth?
Checkology has three student growth measures to help you measure student learning gains and track student progress toward meeting news literacy standards over time. All three measures track the same core news literacy standards and consist of the same 15 questions.
- Measure 1: Pre-assessment
- Measure 2: Post-assessment
- Measure 3: Retention assessment
With data from these measures, you can assess students’ prior knowledge so you can design a meaningful, high-impact and engaging news literacy unit. It can also help you determine student learning gains so you can make informed edits to their news literacy coursework and know when students have mastered news literacy concepts and skills.
Use this chart to get an overview of the measures or read about each below.
Measure 1: Pre-Assessment
- Description:
- This measure appears as an assessment that students are required to take before beginning their assigned news literacy course on Checkology. It typically takes 10-15 minutes for a student to complete all 15 questions. The pre-assessment measure is on by default when you create a new class.
- Accessing results:
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After students have completed the pre-assessment survey, you can view the results by clicking on the "More" tab and then selecting "Pre/Post Assessment" in the dropdown menu. The data from the pre-assessment measure is especially helpful for determining student prior knowledge.
Related article: Class settings: Pre/Post Assessment
Measure 2: Post-Assessment
- Description:
- This measure appears as individual questions at the end of the Checkology assignments to which they are aligned. Some assignments do not contain post-assessment questions, while others contain between one and three. Each question typically takes less than a minute to complete. The post-assessment measure is on by default when you create a new class.
- Accessing results:
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After students have completed a lesson containing a post-assessment question, you can view the results by clicking on the "More" tab and then selecting "Pre/Post Assessment" in the dropdown menu. The data from the post-assessment measure is especially helpful for determining what students learned immediately following their Checkology lesson experience.
Related article: Class settings: Pre/Post Assessment
Measure 3: Retention Assessment
- Description:
- This measure appears as an assessment available on the student Dashboard only when enabled by the educator. Because this assessment measures long-term gains, please enable it after students have completed their entire assigned Checkology course. Just like the pre-assessment measure, this assessment asks students all 15 news literacy questions and can take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. The retention assessment measure is off by default when you create a new class, so it must be enabled in the Class Settings area. Once enabled, the retention assessment appears on the student Dashboard in the same place where the pre-assessment once appeared (at the start of the assigned course). Checkology will give you some easy options for contacting students to take the retention assessment once you’ve enabled it.
- Accessing results:
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Unlike the pre- and post-assessment, retention assessment results are not currently visible to educators. At the end of the school year, NLP will have access to these results as anonymous aggregate data. NLP contracts with independent analysts who match student pre-assessment, post-assessment and retention assessment results to measure whether students maintain their learning gains over time. Reports on this data are made public in the fall after each school year.
Related article: Class settings: Retention assessment
How does NLP use the data?
Anonymous aggregate student growth data helps NLP better understand student learning patterns and improve the platform. As a mission-driven nonprofit organization, this data helps us demonstrate to our funders and supporters that our resources actually work so we can keep Checkology free!
How do I share student growth data?
The results of student growth measures can be a powerful means to help you communicate the importance of a news literacy education to interested administrators, colleagues or other school community members. For example, you might share pre-assessment data with an administrator to show how students stand to benefit from learning about news literacy concepts and skills. You might also share matched pre- and post-assessment data with your school community to celebrate your students' news literacy achievements or offer concrete evidence that news literacy education works.
To share results, we recommend taking screenshots of pre- or post-assessment results in the "Pre/Post Assessment" dropdown menu (located in the "More" tab). To capture results from all 15-questions, try using GoFullPage Chrome browser extension to quickly capture and create a full page .PDF or .PNG of the pre-/post-assessment results window.
How else can I track student progress on Checkology?
You can also gain insights about student learning through in-lesson formative assessments. Many assessments in Checkology lessons are auto-graded by the platform and some are teacher-evaluable. Click here to learn more about evaluating student work.