Assessments and Trackers: Tips for a Successful School Year Start

As the new school year begins, here are a few quick setup tasks to help you have effective use of Mastery Connect.

 

Note on Copied Courses

If your course was copied from a previous school year or semester, you may find Mastery Connect assignments already listed in your new course before your tracker is created. We recommend removing these assignments before creating your new tracker from the course. This will ensure that the previous years’ assignments do not appear for students in their portal and will avoid confusion between previous and current assignments.

 

Remote Scores

When you initially create your tracker and add your students, you may see data present before you’ve delivered any assessments. These are called remote scores and are identified by the small down-fold in the top, right-hand corner of the mastery level or assessment score. These show how a student performed on the same standard or assessment, but in different trackers. This will not prevent a student from assessing in the current tracker and can be hidden from view.

 

Creating/Adding/Managing Assessments

Once you’ve created your tracker the next step is to add assessments. Here are some tips to help you create and add assessments.

Cloning

You may find that it’s more efficient to clone and update assessments that have already been created. We recommend updating the assessment titles to ensure that other users can distinguish the original and clone for searching and reporting.

Select an Alignment Source

In order to add a formative assessment to a map or tracker, all standards covered by the assessment must be present in the map/tracker. If you are not cloning an assessment, you’ll be required to select the standard alignment  for each question. By selecting an alignment source (a curriculum map or tracker), this best ensures that the standards you select are an exact match to those in your map/tracker. It is best practice to add an assessment from a tracker by clicking on the Add Assessment button inside the Tracker. This ensures you have all the correct standards.

Proofread your documents and items

Once an assessment has been created we suggest using the Student Preview to review the assessment and check scoring.

Once added to a tracker, the options to edit the assessment will be limited. To prevent disruptions, proofread all of your assessment documents and items for relevance and accuracy before saving and adding your assessments to maps and trackers.

As you assess, what if an assessment needs to be reopened?

The process for reopening an assessment will depend on the assessment type:

 

Delivering Assessments to Students

When your assessments have been added to your trackers, there are multiple methods to deliver the assessments to your students. Here are some helpful community resources detailing how to use each option. Click on the option to view additional details.

Make sure your tools, accommodations, and text-to-speech settings are correct.

 

Help with Setup

  • Check help documentation
    Many common questions and concerns are answered in our Mastery Connect Community guides on various topics.
  • Refer to your district’s processes
    Your district may have specific contacts who are assigned to work on and with Mastery Connect. If your district has a specific process in place, please refer to those processes first.
  • Utilize the contact set by your district in the “?” Icon
    If your school or district has a specific technical contact in place, it may already be listed in the “?” help icon in the top, right-hand corner of Mastery Connect.
  • What information do I provide when reaching out to support?
    If you encounter an issue that needs to be addressed by Mastery Connect, our Mastery Connect support team is available to help. To best expedite your request it is best to specify the problem, and provide any error messages received, screenshots of the problem, as well as 1 or 2 examples of the issue (specific students, specific teachers, specific tracker, etc.). For security we ask that you only provide student names, and not ID numbers, when submitting your request.