Everything You Need to Know About Test Coordination
It is the time of year again where we find ourselves looking toward the start of spring testing season. You may find yourself asking, “Does it really have to be so stressful?” Although there is still much to do after you get procedures in place, any experienced school test coordinator will tell you that having the right tools and processes will significantly reduce your level of stress and anxiety.
To truly understand a process and increase efficiency you must know that process inside and out. Consider these three steps to make sense of the tangled mess of testing, increase efficiency, and improve the testing experience for staff and students.
- Map out the existing process – think in concrete terms of what happens at each step.
- Identify value – add activities to address pain points.
- Visualize the ideal process – what data is needed to ensure you are prepared?
Everything around test coordination begins and ends with creating the test schedule, but where do you start?
With TestHound, the start of the process centers around data – student and accommodation data. To accurately schedule students for testing, you must first identify the number of students that will need to test based upon current enrollment, while also evaluating groups needed based upon student accommodation data. With nightly feeds from your district’s Student Information System (SIS) and accommodation vendors, school coordinators now have access to the foundational data needed to begin the process. As with anything else, there will inevitably be changes to student enrollment and student accommodations. Staying on top of the changes is paramount to ensuring your test schedule is student-centered. Luckily, TestHound provides test coordinators with updates related to enrollment and accommodations so changes can be made prior to testing (except for that one student that walks in on the day of testing!).
Now that we have identified students who need to test and what their accommodations are, the next step is placing those students into rooms.
There are a multitude of ways that students are placed into testing rooms, including by homeroom and then filtering out students with accommodations, or filtering students with accommodations first and then assigning the remainder of students alphabetically. Each of these methods take considerable time to do by hand and are subject to a greater degree of error. TestHound addresses this pain point by providing the ability to use a combination of auto-assign features while filtering students and then placing them into rooms. Reducing the number of individual touchpoints needed and the visual cues required to know whether students have already been placed into a room dramatically reduces the amount of time to schedule students and increases accuracy.
This year schools have been given greater flexibility in test scheduling to implement best practices to reduce the spread of COVID. While this may not have been our reality when TestHound was created, it is nonetheless an area in which we can provide support for test coordinators. Our team developed Multi-Session Scheduling to allow for testing across extended windows while still providing the same level of efficiency and time savings as traditional single-day testing.
Lest you think the process is over, there are two remaining tasks that loom large over test coordinators – accounting for physical inventory (test booklets) and reporting needs.
Accounting for test booklets is a manual process; however, there is a chain of custody that must be maintained. Not only must the correct number of booklets be received and returned, but there is also the issue of tracking which booklets a student received. The challenge with other manual solutions is having to review chain of custody documents to ensure all booklets are returned or which test booklet a student used. The manual process entails reviewing multiple paper reports to identify and confirm this information – a process that takes hours to complete.
TestHound increases efficiency by allowing users to scan booklets and compare information to the original packing list from the state vendor to confirm receipt of inventory. It also provides the ability to scan test booklets to students individually or to an entire classroom via the auto-scan process. At the conclusion of an assessment window, TestHound also allows for quick inventory of booklets to confirm they are being returned. At any time throughout the process, staff can track inventory from student assignments or distribution boxes.
>>> Read how Lubbock ISD reduced their testing irregularities by 77% with TestHound.
The culmination of the test coordination process is the creation and distribution of test reports. As a test coordinator, the creation of a great schedule is one thing, but it does not fully come together until staff and students are involved. Examining the multitude of reports that need to be created requires a considerable amount of time either by the test coordinator or others involved in the process. TestHound allows test coordinators to efficiently generate all necessary reports for distribution and for use on test day using templates based on state-mandated requirements and best practices for staff and student notification.
The beginning of a process is understanding it, but the key to maintaining progress and increasing efficiency is through imagination. The team at Education Advanced continually innovates solutions to advance the experience for those serving on the front lines, like our school test coordinators.
