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Naiku Blog: News, White Papers, and Case Studies

  • The Achievement Gap: Part 2

    Part 2 in the series on the Achievement Gap by guest blogger Takeshi Terada (tera0026@umn.edu). In Part 1 of this series on the Achievement Gap, I described how closing the achievement gap may not necessarily mean that children’s academic performances are getting closer to each other. This is because the achievement gap is defined and […]

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  • Reliability Concerns for Classroom Summative Assessment

    As Jim Popham has so eloquently stated, “Validity and reliability are the meat and potatoes of the measurement game” (Popham, 2006, p. 100). They are what every psychometrician AND teacher need to know and understand. When psychometricians build large scale tests for state departments of education, there’s a list of validity and reliability concerns that they […]

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  • Google Chromebooks

    When I visit classrooms that are using Naiku, one of the most frustrating downsides of laptops and netbooks is the length of time it takes to get the class started.  The machines can take 5-7 disruptive minutes to boot up, find a network, sign in, and open a browser.  This takes precious time away the class […]

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  • The Achievement Gap (or Proficiency Trap?): Part 1

    This is a guest blog from Takeshi Terada. Takeshi’s interests are in educational policy and assessment. He is particularly interested in data-driven educational evaluation, policy-making & analysis, and decision-making systems in K-12 education that apply both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, mostly using assessment test scores. Takeshi is a graduate of the University of Minnesota […]

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  • The Importance of Student Reflection

    Student Reflection When I do professional development for teachers and administrators on how to incorporate Naiku into their formative assessment practice, the part that gets them most excited is when I talk about student reflection. Merriam-Webster.com defines reflection as “a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation.” Here, […]

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  • Should Formative Assessments be Scored and Graded?

    Scoring Formative Assessments Often, when I do trainings or demonstrations on how to use the Naiku Platform for formative assessment purposes, I am asked how the assessments are scored and exported to grade books. Essentially, the question boils down to “Should formative assessments be scored and graded?“ This is a good question. However, I am […]

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  • Interview with Dr. Beach – What problem is Naiku solving for you?

    This is a video interview Adisack and I did with Dr. Todd Beach.  We’re always talking to our users to see what we can do to make Naiku work better for them.  Dr. Beach was kind enough to let us record some of the conversation. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/21086522 w=398&h=224&frameborder=0&color=98C93C]  

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  • Exciting Enhancements to Naiku

    We have added question-authoring enhancements to Naiku. Today, I wanted to highlight some of those new features. Rich Text Formatting We’ve added a rich text editor. Now you can add many of the common formatting features that you are probably used to with many word processing applications. For example, you can bold, italicize, choose the […]

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  • Students Using Naiku

    We took a trip out to Dr. Todd Beach’s classroom to check-in and see how it is going using Naiku.  Adisack does a nice job with the voice-over, don’t you think? The student feedback was fantastic – we’ve already planned to add a few features to the product based on their requests. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/20383163 w=398&h=224&frameborder=0&color=98C93C] […]

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  • How Item Statistics Can Help Your Formative Assessment Practice

    When I worked as a psychometrician for large testing companies, I would always conduct an item analysis on the test questions to ensure that they were good and reliable.  And when I often met with teacher groups to explain and discuss their statewide accountability test results, the teachers would always ask for the item analysis […]

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Popular Posts

  • Data Driven Instruction with Naiku

    Premier educators such as Dr. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (Driven By Data 2.0: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction) and Dr. John Hattie (Visible Learning) promote the use of data in enhancing instruction and student learning. In this linked white paper, Dr. Adisack Nhouyvanisvong discusses these techniques and showcases how to implement them using Naiku.

  • Achieving Visible Learning with Naiku

    Visible Learning is an excellent resource illustrating the effectiveness of student-centered learning which Naiku wholeheartedly supports. In Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers, Dr. John Hattie (2009, 2012) synthesizes research studies involving hundreds of millions of students to show the effectiveness of different approaches to improve learning. Dr. Hattie found that student-centered learning strategies have the highest […]

  • Use ACT Quick Checks for Progress Monitoring

    Naiku provides over 50 ACT Quick Checks for teachers to use for student progress monitoring in all ACT test subjects. ACT Quick Checks are short, topic-focused, formative assessments; typically 6-12 questions in length. Each Quick Check contains questions from a single topic, such as Math-Functions, so teachers can use to easily monitor progress between benchmark […]

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