NAAP Instructor Assessment Guide

NAAP – Instructor Assessment Guide

For EDU Assessments – Nebraska Astronomy Animation Project

Each NAAP Animation and instructional materials are sandwiched between a pretest and posttest. By comparing the posttest and pretest scores for a large number of students, we can judge how effective NAAP materials are at teaching astronomy.

Your students may either take assessments in the shared NAAP account or in your own personal account. Each instructor's account has access to the same NAAP assessments plus their own unique electronic gradebook to record student scores. However, you will only have access to your student's scores if you obtain your own assessment account and this is the recommended approach. All NAAP assessments are randomized – meaning that each student will get a slightly different, but very comparable version.

These assessments are given in EDU – a web-based assessment engine marketed by Brownstone Learning. This document spells out everything instructors need to know to take advantage of these capabilities. Requesting Your Assessment Account

All instructors of high school or college astronomy classes who request an assessment account will be given one. A web form for requesting an account can be found on the NAAP site at http://astro.unl.edu on the page entitled Request Assessment Account from the Assessment menu.

You will receive your assessment account information by email, which will consist of an Instructor Account Name and password. The Instructor Account Name consists of 7 to 11 characters which will be represented as XXXXXXXXX in the remainder of this document. It is a unique URL suffix which is typically an abbreviation of your name and your school. For example, Dave Kriegler at UNO has been assigned an account name of KrieglerUNO. Locating Your Assessment Account

All assessment accounts can be listed by entering the following URL in a browser: http://calculus.unl.edu/edu/classes/

If you (or any of your students) should ever forget your account name, you could find it in this list. You can directly address your specific account by appending your Instructor Account Name to the above URL. Thus, your account is accessed at the following URL: http://calculus.unl.edu/edu/classes/astroXXXXXXXXX

On the NAAP site, direct links are provided to each assessment. Students simply need to enter their Instructor's Account Remember that the X’s Name and they will be taken to the represent your instructor appropriate assessment in the EDU account name. Your system. Throughout the NAAP site students will need to know there are boxes where students simply this too. need to enter your account name to access the EDU system. Inheritance

NAAP EDU assessment accounts take advantage of a parent-child inheritance hierarchy. Each instructor's account is a child account of the parent NAAP account. This means that each account inherits all NAAP testbanks and assessments, yet has its own electronic gradebook. What to Tell Your Students

There is a student guide to NAAP assessments that parallels this document. Instructors should work through the student guide at this time! It is strongly recommended that instructors create a student account for themselves and take the assessments as a student. This is the best way to get a good feeling for the NAAP assessments.

Remind your students that when entering the instructor's account name, it's CaSe SeNsItIvE. KrieglerUNO is not the same as kriegleruno. This is important because it will be very difficult for students to register and take the assessments without the proper instructor account name. Typical Instructor Account Home Page

Logging into to Your Account

From you Account Home Page, click Instructor Login and you will be taken to a page where you can enter your Login Name and Password. You will eventually end up on the Main Menu shown below. You may get to this screen at any time in EDU by clicking the home icon (a little house). Gradebook

All student records are stored in the Gradebook. Instructors are encouraged to experiment with the gradebook – it is fairly self explanatory. However, a couple of points should be emphasized.

 You may export the gradebook as an Excel file (or other formats) and download it to your own computer. Simply check the box labeled "Download this table as:" before clicking Get Report.  In the administration tab of the gradebook there is an option to delete all records. You may wish to do this at the end of a term to avoid having students from multiple terms in the gradebook. Closing Comments

All NAAP assessments are ready to go when instructors receive their accounts. From this document you can see that the information and skills needed for instructors to make use of these assessments in their classes is minimal.

Instructors who are interested in learning more about EDU are directed to the UNL EDU home page at http://scimath.unl.edu/EDU. Many sources of information can be found there including a variety of public domain testbanks and training documents to lead you through more complex tasks in EDU.