ANet Assessments

Interims are a good complement to MAP. NWEA MAP is designed to show growth and predict student outcomes. Interims help teachers change student outcomes.   

• MAP does not allow teachers to see the questions each student received, what their response to a specific question is, and their thinking as they worked on the problem. ANet interims are designed to reveal the specific understandings and misconceptions that students have so that teachers can address them. 
• ANet interims are designed from the relevant rigorous standards. MAP is not standards-based. MAP tells you if a student is at grade level, and high level trends, but it does not give you insight into the specific skills and misconceptions that are holding students back.  Understanding the specific standards where  students need support allows teachers to anticipate challenges in upcoming lessons, and think about how to scaffold in foundational skills that might need extra support.
• MAP is not aligned to the curriculum, so it will not reflect what teachers have recently taught. ANet interims are designed to be compatible with the curriculum and reflect what teachers have recently taught. 
• MAP can often be very time consuming because it tests students on a large body of content, including things teachers haven’t taught yet. This wastes time, distracts educators, and frustrates students.

ANet interims would replace iReady if you want to have your assessments and curriculum aligned and in the same platform. That’s more convenient for your teachers, and it enables them to take better action because everything is in one place. It’s also more convenient for administrators because it simplifies procurement and platform management. 

• ANet interims are compatible  to your curriculum, iReady is not. The most important thing an interim assessment can do is tell you if students have learned the content you recently taught. Because it’s not aligned to your curriculum, iReady can’t do that as well as ANet’s assessments. 
• ANet assessments reflect the breadth and depth of each standard as it was covered in the curriculum. iReady assessments use the same number of questions to address each standard, which means they can miss critical elements of the standard.

While our assessments were designed to support teachers ability to take action from assessment results, we can also provide important information to school and system leaders:

• Focus on equity by disaggregating assessment  data by school/cluster or by student groups. System leaders may have groups they would like to focus on to ensure the needed supports are in place for students.
• Understanding curriculum implementation by reviewing the data by standards in relation to what was taught. Identify outliers  in the data that invite you to investigate how instructional practices relate to  the curriculum.
• Look at standards data for key insights and trends supported by the data. For example: The literacy screener data indicates that our K-2 students may need stronger foundational skills instruction -or- Interim data from 7th grade math classrooms indicates that students may not be spending enough time on major work of the grade level.
  
  

Great question! We know that fewer, better assessments that provide actionable, real-time data and empower students and educators is a key to student achievement. We help educators create an ideal assessment suite through two different ways. 

• Our Assessment Strategy work gives our expert coaches the opportunity to work alongside your educational leaders to audit your existing assessments. This process gleans how many assessments your students are taking, what are their purposes, and how often they are administered to ensure your assessments align with your instructional goals. 
• Our Interim Assessment is our leading instructional product that includes standards-based questions designed to measure students' learning throughout the school year. Combined with myANet, our data and resource hub, ANet interim assessments give educators the right tool to impact students. 

ANet offers Spanish Language Arts (SLA) assessments in grades 2-5. SLA assessments are developed with authentic Spanish texts and reflect ANet assessment design principles. In addition to the assessments themselves, ANet also provides text features guides, which provide details on all assessment texts and their qualitative complexity; analysis guides in English to support teachers reviewing student work for writing items; and reports for SLA assessments in myANet.

Our team of experts continue to ensure our online assessment platform is accessible to all students and has the tools in place to make the necessary student accommodations. Existing accommodations include: 

• ELA and Math Text-to-Speech - The text-to-speech function gives students the ability to hear the text of the online assessments read to them, using a tool in the Online Assessment Platform. A student will only have the text-to-speech toolbar available on their assessment if text-to-speech has been enabled for that student on the ‘Students’ tab.
• Math Language Translation - This tool provides students with a direct Spanish translation of individual words when students hover their mouse over those words in  the Online Assessment Platform. 
• OpenDyslexic Font Plugin for Chrome - Enabling the OpenDyslexic extension on Chrome, overrides all fonts on webpages with the OpenDyslexic font, a typeface designed against some common symptoms of dyslexia, by adding heavy weighted bottoms to aid in recognizing letters.