Skill Assessments

Skill assessments was a one-on-one, generally teacher-assessing-student, assessment creation and administration project that I created during one of our “Ship-it-days” ¹.

I thought of the idea after my sons teacher shared with me a DIBELS report that she had made by hand. I thought about the amount of time it took to make these reports by hand and figured I could make something that would save her time and give her more data to help my son with.

Here is an example video I found that someone made showing how my skill assessments project works:

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There were multiple parts to this project:

• The administration UI - This was built as a javascript plugin with Backbone. It allowed users to administer a skill assessment to a student, showing one question at a time and allowing the user to mark the student’s response as correct or incorrect using buttons or keyboard shortcuts. When the administration finished they could add a comment for parents that would be printed on reports and then select another student to start administering to next.
• The item editor - This was built with vanilla javascript and a few js libraries for creating svgs/images in the browser. The editor allowed the user to create items with text, images, different fonts, etc. This was important because it allowed skills assessments to be used for more than just fluency types of assessments; skill assessments could be used for giving music assessments or health assessments
• The assessment editor - This allowed users to create an assessment with multiple items and also group those questions into groups for reporting.
• Reporting - I setup materialized views in postgres to store aggregated data to make reporting easier.

I loved this project because it wasn’t something that was on the roadmap, but it was a problem that existed in the field. After it was released, skill assessments quickly became one of the most popular assessment types in Illuminate. It was something that I would talk to users about at regional meetings and our conference to get feedback on how to make it even better.