Back to School Refresh: 5 Essentials for a Successful School Year

The start of a school year can bring a wave of emotions for both new and experienced teachers. There’s so much to do and so little time to get it all done. Whether you’re trying to create a new structure with your students or try something new, ASSISTments is here to help! 

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Check out these 5 Essential Tools available in ASSISTments to support your classroom structures and routines:

5 Essential Tools

1. Customizing Problem Sets
2. Differentiating Assignments to a Subset of Students
3. Student Reports
4. Assignment Reports
5. Quick Comments

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#1 Customizing Problem Sets

It’s important for students to be able to practice key skills taught in the curriculum. One way to ensure students are focusing on  essential skills is to customize the problems you assign. This allows you to pick which problems you’d like for students to complete, whether that’s for independent work, homework or even the exit ticket. By customizing the problems you assign, you can guarantee that students are learning the necessary skills they need to be successful in the math classroom.

#2 Differentiating Assignments to a Subset of Students

Student mastery on a standard as well as concepts is crucial throughout their learning path. Nevertheless,  it’s important to recognize that each student has a unique learning style. In order to ensure all students  are fully understanding the material, you may have to do some differentiation throughout the lesson. Using the “Assignment Report” as well as the ability to “Customize Problem Sets” allows you to assign different practice problems to students based on their need for remediation or accelerations. ASSISTments has supported this work with creating 30 Deep Dive videos that discuss different strategies you can use to implement differentiation. One example would be “My Favorite No.” Check out what that looks like from this webinar. 

To get started on differentiating and assigning problems to a subset of students, take a look at this short video. 

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#3 Student Reports

The Student Report is accessible to both students and teachers after a student submits an assignment in ASSISTments giving students an opportunity  to view their scores by problem and overall. ASSISTments has two different ways of reporting data within this report. These are the “Symbols of Success” and the “Scores and Average.” It’s important to set up structures and practices at the beginning of the school year so that students feel comfortable and familiar with the report. 

This resource will help you access the student report as well as interpret the different symbols.

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#4 Assignment Reports

Data  can be a powerful tool to inform instruction. While data protocols might vary, one thing that is consistent are the ways you can use the data to adjust your instructional practices. One of the benefits of ASSISTments is the immediate feedback and grading of assignments, which allows teachers to spend less time grading and more time analyzing the data to improve or customize instruction for each student. In this video, Mr. Burnett, an ASSISTments Teacher shows how he uses the assignment report to review data with his class.  

You can also click here for a resource to interpret the data report.

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#5 Quick Comments

Grading open response questions can be a tedious task, as these questions typically don’t include immediate feedback and scoring. With the use of the “QUICK Comments” feature, scoring these problems is now easier than ever! This feature uses A.I. to suggest personalized immediate feedback & scores for teachers to send to their students. Check out this video as a demonstration for how “QUICK Comments” works. 

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Whether it’s your first school year using ASSISTments or you have a few years under your belt, these features can help you support your classroom structures and routines.