Bay-Arenac ISD Selects Online Assessment Tool
to Measure Students’ Mastery of State Standards

Bay City, Mich. (Apr. 23, 2008) – Teachers and administrators in the Bay-Arenac ISD region will soon benefit from up-to-date information on student progress provided throughout the school year by a new online formative assessment system.

With the help of Bay-Arenac ISD, eight local school districts have collaborated to purchase STIAssessment, a web-based formative assessment creation and data tracking system. The contract with STI, a leading provider of education data management systems, includes implementation, training and product use. The system will be rolled out to Arenac-Eastern Schools, Bangor Township Schools, Bay-Arenac Community High School, Bay City Public Schools, Bay County Public School Academy, Essexville-Hampton Public Schools, Pinconning Area Schools, and Standish-Sterling Community Schools in July of this year.

Following implementation and training, teachers can use STIAssessment to create and administer online formative assessments and gather data detailing student performance on state standards. Formative assessments—also called benchmark assessments or classroom assessments—are planned activities such as weekly quizzes and chapter tests. They are designed to provide evidence of student learning and pinpoint areas for instructional modifications throughout the school year and the students’ academic careers. These assessments are part of an ongoing, active learning process. Formative assessment is one of the multiple student achievement measurements the Bay-Arenac ISD uses to gauge success and meet mandated educational goals under the No Child Left Behind Act.

“STIAssessment is an important step toward meeting our student achievement goals and state accountability mandates,” explained Bay-Arenac ISD Superintendent Michael Dewey. “School districts nationwide are expanding their formative assessment programs because a growing body of research shows formative assessment significantly improves student learning and helps close the achievement gap.”

With STIAssessment, teachers can create, administer and score assessments quickly. Teachers can easily develop formative assessments using the system’s large bank of questions that are correlated to state curriculum standards, or they can create their own questions. Testing can be conducted online or on paper, with teachers as well as students receiving immediate results regardless of the method. Using real-time results, teachers can identify clearly which standards a student or the whole class has not mastered. Guided by these findings, they can take the necessary steps to tailor instruction that will help their students improve, instead of falling ever farther behind.

Administrators are able to compile reports of aggregate and disaggregate data in the STI system to meet local and federal reporting requirements. Assessment data of student subgroups are used to make critical decisions regarding resource allocation, budgeting, and professional development.

More Information

To learn more about STIAssessment, phone 800-844-0884 or visit www.sti-k12.com.

About STI

STI is a leading provider of Education Data Management solutions to the K-12 market. STI’s fully integrated suite of products addresses attendance, scheduling, special education, assessment, discipline, grade reporting, professional development, fund accounting, health, and parent/teacher communications. More than 6,000 schools in 28 states use STI solutions. The company was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Mobile, Ala.

Contacts

STI
Jenna Wood
800-844-0884
jwood at sti-k12 dot com
www.sti-k12.com

C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.
Charlene Blohm
608-839-9800
charlene at cblohm dot com
www.cblohm.com