Edupoint Expands Technology Enhanced Item Authoring in Synergy Assessment

Edupoint® Educational Systems now supports the authoring of more than a dozen technology enhanced item (TEI) types within Synergy Assessment. TEI authorship within the assessment module gives school districts, schools, and teachers more control over the assessments they administer to students, with the ability to create the same innovative item types that appear on the latest computer-based state assessments, such as PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Students benefit greatly from learning how these item types work before they encounter them in the high-pressure situation of state testing. In addition, TEI authorship enables educators to create online assessments that look at student learning from a variety of angles and yield new, actionable insights into specific problem areas for students. Recent enhancements to Synergy Assessment enable districts to create matching, number line, select point, and graphic drag and drop TEIs in addition to previous TEI types.

Synergy Assessment is a comprehensive assessment solution for K-12 school districts that enables educators to create formative, interim/benchmark, and summative assessments with ease, aligned to standards and stored centrally for districtwide access. Real-time data analysis tools provide teachers and school and district administrators with actionable insights relevant to their role, such as performance against district and state standards (including the Common Core), performance measures for student subgroups such as special education students, and school- or district-level results. As part of Synergy Education Platform, Synergy Assessment is designed to work seamlessly with other Synergy modules with the ability to send data in real time to the teacher gradebook where assessment scores can be viewed alongside other assignments, to parent and student portals to keep families informed, and to Synergy Analytics to be analyzed against data from other Synergy modules and additional databases on the district network.

“We are very enthusiastic about adding technology enhanced item creation in Synergy Assessment,” said Rob Wilson, President and Chief Innovation Officer at Edupoint. "Teachers now have the opportunity to glean insights not achievable using traditional item types, and are empowered to pinpoint knowledge gaps and reteach concepts more effectively than ever before.”

Synergy Assessment currently serves nearly 1 million students nationwide.