Best Practices for Verifying Student Accommodations Before Uploading Them Into TIDE
No doubt about it. Educators who work with special needs students to ensure that they have proper testing accommodations create a more equitable system for everyone. The question is, just how do school testing administrators verify that all students have the proper accommodations before student info gets loaded into TIDE, the Test Information Distribution Engine.
That was the topic that TestHound Account Executive, Lara Miller and her two guests, Shannon Kuhrt, District Testing Coordinator for Northside ISD, and Jamie Hagler Barron, Director of Special Programs and Testing at Vidor ISD, chatted about during our most recent Education Advanced webinar.
What Miller discovered was that success in these endeavors often came down to using TestHound to do the heavy lifting and the willingness to look at accommodations far in advance of the spring testing season.
What Are Your First Steps?
Shannon Kuhrt: That is a very important question. I’ll tell you a bit about our processes as well as the processes we’ve used in the past. I’ll also tell you about the processes we have here now and how we verify those.
The most important step to take first is to make sure that your students’ accommodations are verified before you load them into TIDE. We start with TestHound, and we run our master accommodations report by program. That would be programs, like special education, 504, the emergent bilingual, etc. We then export that information into an Excel spreadsheet. Once we have that list, we can then export it into TIDE.
Additionally, we always have the automatic feed running from our hub that houses all of our accommodations into TestHound. That updates every night. Afterwards, we export those spreadsheets or lists to the program coordinator on campus. Those might be the Language Proficiency Assessment Committee (LPAC), special education, or 504 coordinators. They then verify the list to determine if anything is incorrect in TestHound. Once the errors are fixed, it’s uploaded to TIDE.
That is basically the process that we use. We don't do that process until about two weeks before testing to make sure everything is good to go for testing.
Of course, campuses are always looking at accommodations because we do all of our state interim assessments throughout the year, so they're always looking at them, and they're always on top of them. But we require them to do that final verification before our state assessment.
Jamie Hagler Barron: Our process is almost identical. We pull out that master accommodations report by program so that every coordinator can look at just the students that they come in contact with, and we have them double check it.
Too many different types of accommodations can cause issues later, so we get them to verify to make sure that all of our students have what they need, and we get them to sign off on it.
Can you both talk a bit more about how you streamline the system to get that information into the Cambium TIDE system?
Jamie Hagler Barron: Well, one thing I will tell you is what it does not look like. I compare it to having to register every student by hand. We have an upload file that helps us to register the kids all at once.
When you download the file from TestHound after you’ve gotten the kids set up in their test, you can then go into Cambium and upload. It's not even 10 clicks.
Shannon Kuhrt: I gave my campuses a deadline, telling them when I was going to upload that district’s file. I said, “Hey, if you want me to upload all your accommodations, then you have to have your students and test sessions turned in by this date.”
Or I gave them the option of working with the files themselves, because campuses can also download their own attribute file and then upload it into TIDE themselves. And so, some of them did it themselves. Last year was the first year we had ever done that, and they loved it!
Many of them felt okay about doing it because they had verified their accommodation rosters a couple of weeks before. After that, it was just a matter of monitoring their system alert boxes.
Finally, can you talk about any questions that you have that seem to come up every year? Do you have a great recommendation that would help people handle those common problems?
Shannon Kuhrt: What I would tell them is, you need to make sure you let TestHound work for you. Very often, they want to go in and do everything themselves. I'm like, “No, that's not the point of TestHound. You want it to work for you. You want the automatic feeds to work. You want everything syncing correctly.”
You also want to go in to see if they’ve accepted their alerts. You don’t want a campus to auto-publish an alert. You want to teach your campuses to check their alert boxes because you don’t want the system auto-publishing something they’re not even aware of.
Otherwise, they think that the system is wrong because it’s not matching. That’s the most common thing that we see.
TestHound can streamline your accommodations inputs. Reach out to us today to learn how to make TestHound work for you.
