Surviving the Storm: What Can We Learn from ILEARN?

Last summer, school administrators and teachers prepared for a category 5 hurricane, named COVID-19, as it steadily approached their shores. Evacuating wasn’t an option. They had to hunker in place and reinforce, reinvent, and build/rebuild structures (hybrid learning, online learning, social-distant at-school learning) that could both protect and prepare their students. They worked relentlessly to bring a sense of normalcy to a situation that was anything but normal—fighting through the violent winds, pouring rain, and surging sea levels of concerned parents, confused students, and contradictory guidelines. And now, as they huddle together during a break in the clouds after a year filled with surprises, sacrifices, and sorrow, they must find a way to pick up the pieces and move forward.

Identifying students who have fallen behind in their learning and determining where to take action are a few of the first critical steps in the recovery. In Indiana, schools have started to receive results of ILEARN, the state-wide assessments administered to students in grades 3-8. Unfortunately, getting the answers they seek from the data often in itself becomes challenging. And, in a year when everything has been hard, school administrators deserve something easy.

At Five Star, we help make data analytics easy for schools. Here are just a few features of our Pivot Data Warehouse and Student Learning Dashboards that allow administrators and teachers to quickly identify students needing additional support:

1. Bubble Filter – Quickly identify groups of students who fall right outside of a certain proficiency level. When using the bubble filter, set the point value above and/or below the appropriate proficiency level to identify student scores within that range.