Here’s a post by Erin Chreptyk, our Coordinator for the Help Me Tell My Story Assessment.
A pivotal component of this holistic assessment approach is connecting results to ideas. This linkage helps focus in on areas of improvement and provides teachers and parents with targeted activities to improve language development.
Enjoy!
USING RESULTS TO PRODUCE CHANGE
As the New Year begins, the Help Me Tell My Story assessment enters a new phase. This is what makes this assessment great. It keeps giving after the student, caregiver, teacher, and Elder have been assessed. Most assessments involve collecting information and then providing those involved in the student’s education with the results, and that is where they end.
The Help Me Tell My Story assessment goes beyond providing results. We believe that results should be immediate and should provide those involved in the student’s education with the means to take the results and produce change.
Just how do we do that?
Educator and Caregiver Portals
All educators and caregivers are given passwords that provide them with access to online portals.
The caregiver portal allows caregivers to view their child’s assessment results. The results are composed of data from the student, teacher, caregiver, and Elder surveys. The results are not simply listed as answers to the questions that were asked. Rather, the child’s results are displayed in a circle graph that illustrates the balance in the child’s learning in the home, school, and community. The caregiver can listen to an audio recording of their child telling a story. They can learn about the use of ancestral language by teachers, caregivers, and teachers in their community. Importantly, they can see how their child perceives their opportunities and access for learning in the home, school, and community.
The educator portal allows educators to view aggregate assessment data related to their classroom, school, and from all the divisions participating in the assessment. The scope of data that the educator can access ranges from what activities caregivers feel are important to do with their children, average language proficiency scores, how often children engage in specific learning activities, what learning activities children would like to do more of, and types of oral stories used by teachers in the classroom. This data is displayed in both graph and table formats. Educators can also view the caregiver portal to see individual results for students in their class.
Learning Ideas
Educators and caregivers are able to access learning ideas from their respective online portals. Learning ideas are but one of the components of this assessment that make it different and that put in place the means for the results to produce action. They are a means to further a child’s language proficiency. When a child completes a learning idea, the learning idea can be checked off, and the child’s places of learning circle graph will grow. Learning ideas are organized by activity type, place of learning, and language.
As you can see, Help Me Tell My Story is much more then an assessment. In my next blog, I will discuss another way that this assessment goes a step further to ensure that results produce change.
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