How Do You Assess Students?

I don't know about you, but assessing the effectiveness of my program, specifically classroom guidance lessons, has always been difficult for me. I know how to do it, it's just hard to do with 1100 students and not spend all your time tallying pre/posts tests. Google Docs would be a fantastic way to do pre/post tests with my students, however, we don't have a class set of tablets for me to use during my lessons, and scheduling a computer lab is difficult. With these road blocks I was getting frustrated and felt like giving up. Until I heard about GradeCam in a staff meeting!

GradeCam is a program that uses a camera (either installed on your computer as a document camera or the camera on your tablet) to score tests. It is honestly a life saver! All you need to do is create a free account on GradeCam's website, upload your class rosters (which sounds hard, but these can be easily accessed through your student information system and literally takes two minutes to do), and create your test/quiz/pre/post test. GradeCam will generate an answer sheet for each student in the class you choose and all you have to do is hand it out to the students. I usually have the teacher do this so it saves time. Once the students complete the answer sheet (bubble in their answers) you collect them and one by one stick them underneath the camera. GradeCam will automatically score each students answer sheet and generate several reports for you. BOOM, your assessment of how well your lesson went is done in 15 minutes! You can do all this on your computer, or do it on your tablet through the app. It has been a game changer for me. Below are several screen shots to give you an idea of what it does:

 

This is the dashboard when you first login,

 

This is the average score of the students taking the test. You can filter this by all students or by class.

 This will give you the item analysis of each question.

A sample form. If you select a class, it will put each kids name on it and generate a four digit code for them.

It's a few steps to get it set up, but once you do, it saves you SO much time. I can't wait to utilize it even more this year.

How do you assess your program and your students progress? What tools do you use? Please share below!