This blog post is part of the Mastery Connect back to school series, where we highlight the feature enhancements and updates to prepare you to maximize your upcoming school year. Other blogs in this series include:
Also check out our Back to School Tips & Tricks:
- Teachers: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
- Assessments and Trackers: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
- Admin: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
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We’re excited to unveil the enhanced item bank experience in Mastery Connect — built around your feedback to deliver a faster, smarter, and more intuitive experience. Whether you’re authoring new content or searching for just the right assessment item, this upgrade is designed to save you time and help you focus on what matters most: your students.
Why We Built This Feature
We know how critical it is to quickly find or create the assessment content you need to turn meaningful insights into student learning. That’s why the new item bank experience includes:
- Streamlined item and passage authoring for building diverse, high-quality content with ease
- Advanced filtering and search tools to locate exactly what you need based on metadata like standards, difficulty levels, item types, usage and more
- Smarter draft management, including bulk actions, to help you work more efficiently
Every enhancement is aimed at helping educators and administrators build better assessments faster — so you can gather the data you need to make informed instructional decisions.
Early users are already seeing the impact:
“I love being able to change the order of columns.”
“Multipart items—now they’re linked together!”
Thank you for shaping this experience with your input. We can’t wait for you to try it out.
How the New Item Bank Experience Works
Updated Look and Feel for Intuitive Navigation
Toggle Between Views - Choose the view that works best for your role. Switch seamlessly between table (for metadata-heavy tasks) and card layouts (for visual browsing).
Configurable Metadata - Customize columns in your table view to display only the data that matters to you like standards alignment, item type, or difficulty level. Change the order in which metadata appears and add or remove data flexibly to make your item bank work for you.
Enhanced Authoring & Preview Tools
Streamlined Authoring Experience - Create items and passages using a workflow that matches the way you author content in the assessment builder, making the content authoring more seamless and intuitive across Mastery Connect.
In-Context Previews
- Create or clone items directly from passage previews, ensuring alignment between questions and source material.
- Easily navigate between items and passages within their respective indexes directly from the preview modals.
Smarter Search & Filtering
Advanced Filters - Refine your search by item bank, standard, item type, difficulty, or advanced metadata such as Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Choose to include or exclude items that you’ve already used to ensure that you’re finding the content that you need for the most accurate measurements of students’ performance.
Bulk Actions & Draft Management
Draft Workflows - Quickly identify missing information in draft items to ensure they are complete and ready for publishing in assessments.
Bulk Actions - Publish, delete, or assign standards to multiple draft items simultaneously.
Admin Item Bank Index
Item banks for administrators now have a dedicated location under Admin > Manage > Item Banks. Item banks are organized by type and display enhanced metadata, including the number of published and draft items.
Built for Efficiency, Designed for Impact
The redesigned Item Bank experience delivers thoughtful solutions to the everyday challenges faced by administrators and teachers - making it easier to manage, find, and use high-quality assessment content.
- For Administrators, publishing and aligning content at scale is now smoother and more efficient. Bulk editing, advanced filtering, and streamlined draft management eliminate tedious manual work. With the dedicated admin item bank index and enhanced metadata, organizing and overseeing large item collections is not only easier, it’s faster and more precise than ever before.
- For Teachers, intuitive search tools and customizable metadata make locating the right items simpler and faster. Teachers can toggle between different views, preview items in context, and take bulk actions, all designed to speed up assessment creation and planning. These upgrades empower teachers to build meaningful assessments more efficiently and focus on what they do best - supporting student learning through timely, data-informed instruction.
But wait, there’s more!
One of the top requests we heard from early testers of the new Item Bank was the ability to create an assessment directly from the index, without extra steps or back-and-forth navigation. We’re excited to announce that this is now possible!
To address this, we built a solution that enables assessment creation from the index when users are scoped to a single subject, core, and class alignment. With just a few clicks, you can now build an assessment right from the item bank, streamlining your workflow and saving valuable time.
Here’s how it works:
- Use the filter tray to select your subject, core, and class.
- Choose the items you want to include.
- Click the “Create Assessment” button below the filters.
- Give your assessment a title and click Next.
That’s it! A new draft assessment will be created, ready for review and editing—saving you valuable time and making content creation even more efficient.
It’s just one more way we’re solving real problems based on your feedback. We’re listening — and continuously building features that help you work smarter, faster, and with more impact. Try it today!
