Schoolnet Instructional Improvement System Version 21.0 Release Notes August 2019

Overview

My Schoolnet Enhancements

● New “What’s New” design

Assessments Enhancements

● Item Banks for Item Management ● New Experience for Searching Items, Passages and Rubrics ● Licensing ● Standards Template ● Answer Key Only Blueprint ● Test Detail Modernization ● Text to Speech Updates ● Force Submit Score Page Enhancement ● Force Publication Permission ● Manually Scorable Questions Score Page Enhancements ● Updated Online Presentation for Matching items ● Configurable values for "Test", "Benchmark", and "Standardized" ● Hiding bubble-in student IDs on answer sheets

KPI Dashboard Enhancements

● Custom Spacers for the KPI Dashboard

System Enhancements

● Expanded LMS Integration Support

Additional IIS Enhancements

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 My Schoolnet Enhancements

What’s New

Schoolnet’s What’s New screen has been enhanced to improve readability and highlight the key features

being released to all users.

● What’s New will highlight main features for the release with a short description and (where needed) screenshot for each feature.

● The bottom of What’s New will contain a link to the full Release Notes for additional information on the highlighted features as well as the others contained within the release.

● The What’s New screen will be emphasized at first login, for visibility (excludes student and parent users).

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 Assessment Enhancements

Item Banks for Item Management

Prior to version 21.0, items outside of tests were shared with others through co-authoring or by way of Item

Central sharing. Version 21.0 introduces a different method of sharing items through Item Banks and

removes the legacy workflows of individually sharing items, rubrics, and passages through Item Central or

Co-Authoring.

All personal or public items, rubrics, and passages must now be saved in an Item Bank. Pre-existing items,

rubrics, and passages in Item Central and Co-Authoring will be assigned to auto-generated Item Banks based

on the way the items were formerly shared.

Item Banks can be created by any user with access to the Assessments module and the new operation, “Create an item bank.”

The bank’s sharing settings define which site users can view the bank and its contents. The creator of the bank is considered the bank’s primary manager, and will automatically have the highest level access (Manage) to the bank. There are three levels of bank access that can be assigned:

● View Only ○ Can browse the bank’s items, rubrics,

and passages and add them to test drafts

● View & Edit ○ “View Only” access, and also: ○ Can edit the items, rubrics, and

passages within the bank, for items with an open license

○ Can move the items, rubrics, and passages to other banks where the user has “manage” access

● Manage ○ "View Only" access, “View and Edit”

access, and also: ○ Can update the bank properties (title,

description) ○ Can delete the bank, if it is empty ○ Can control which users and

institutions can access the bank and the type of access to be given

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Bank managers can assign bank access to individual people; bank managers with the added permission of “Share item bank with an institution” can share the bank to everyone at their institution and/or to Test Item Administrators at their institution.

Item Banks enable item management scenarios that were previously time-intensive or difficult, including:

● Bulk updating the sharing rules for a large quantity of items, rubrics, and passages ● Grouping and/or tagging specific items in some way to help users identify their purpose or origin

A new Item Banks page provides users with a visual inventory of the banks to which the user has access, and

single-click entry to its contents. From the Item Banks page, users can:

● Search items, rubrics or passages across all available banks

● Search items, rubrics or passages within an individual bank (from here, records can be moved to

another bank by users with “View & Edit” bank access)

● Edit bank properties (for banks where the user has “Manage” access)

● Create a New Bank (if user has “Create item banks” operation”

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 New Experience for Searching Items, Passages and Rubrics

The experience of searching items, rubrics, and passages has been optimized and streamlined. Searching will

be performed within a popup window so that users are not redirected to another page and taken away from

their larger task, such as test building.

Users can launch an item search from the Item Banks page, or by using the

“Find” link in the site navigation menu, under Items, Rubrics, and Passages.

From a test draft, users also have direct access to searching and selecting

items for test use.

From the search result screen, a collapsible left panel will provide quick access to apply common filters, as

well as open "All Filters" to apply more advanced search criteria (for item and passage searches). Records

that meet the user’s filter criteria will show in a scrollable list. The search results for items will include a

snapshot of their online rendering so that users can more quickly evaluate the item.

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Searches will be limited to the banks the user can access. The actions that show for individual search results

records and for groups of selected records will vary and depend on the user’s access level to the selected

item’s bank. A license attached to an item or passage will also affect the actions available.

These enhancements will change the user’s experience of browsing for items, rubrics, and passages to add to

draft assessments. Rather than searching Item Central, users will be searching across the banks they can

access, using a new search and filter interface.

Apart from search experience, the test editing process has not been changed. Items and passages added to a

test can be edited by the test editors, regardless of the item’s original Item Bank.

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 Licensing

QTI imported items, passages, and rubrics now have licenses attached to them. License restrictions apply to

all users regardless of user operations or item bank permissions.

● An expiry date can be set for the license which will make the associated content disappear from

item banks once that date passes.

● The license can be set to "Restricted", which will prevent content from being edited, exported,

or copied. Items that Schoolnet users create cannot be linked to restricted passages.

● To adopt a license, specify a non-Schoolnet vendor and publisher in the QTI imsmanifest.xml file

and delete any Schoolnet context blocks. The license name is based on the publisher, so if

different licenses for a set of items from the same vendor is desired, make the publisher name

for those items descriptive and unique. For example "Custom Urdu Language Bank by Certica"

and "Navigate Bank by Certica" vs "Certica, Inc." or "Certica Bank" as the publisher name.

● Pearson employees can add / modify expiry dates, toggle the license between "Open" and

"Restricted", delete licenses, and rename licenses on a vendor's or customer's behalf.

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 Standards Template

The standards template allows for the selection of standards that appear on the assessment during

assessment creation. These standards are available when adding items to the assessment via a drop down

box to make selecting standards a quicker and easier process.

● When creating a manual test, a standards template can be added to an assessment, allowing the

test creator to identify the standards that will be used on the test.

● Once a user has identified standards in the standards template, those standards will display in a

dropdown box when creating or selecting items. By clicking All Standards, standards not listed

in the Standards Template can be chosen for the item.

● The Standards Template can be edited to add or remove standards by clicking on the Standards

Selected link on the top left corner of the Edit Item screen.

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 Answer Key Only Blueprint

A single page quick entry workflow for entering Answer Key Only assessments into Schoolnet.

● Answer Key Only assessments can be created from Assessments -> Create -> Answer Key Only.

The Create Modal allows for the entry of the assessment properties.

● The Standards Template allows the test creator to pick a set of standards that will be available

via a dropdown to align to each item on the assessment.

● A PDF of the assessment can be uploaded, if desired and viewed while creating the blueprint for

the assessment.

● True/False, Multiple Choice, Gridded, Open Response, Inline Response, Matching, and Checklist

items are supported item types that can be entered into the blueprint. Each item type allows

for a single or multiple standards alignment as well as their unique properties to be defined.

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 Test Detail Modernization

Enhancements have been made to make the Test Details Page more user friendly and easier to use.

● Drag and Drop Reordering ○ Allow user to quickly change order of questions on assessment

○ On the edit item page, a user can drag and drop the question items to reorder them.

The questions will automatically reorder and renumber based on the user’s actions.

CAUTION: Reordering and renumbering is required if the items leverage custom

numbering.

● Test Details Page Header ○ Updated the look and feel of the Assessment Name, Assessment ID, Passcode, and Test

Stages in order to focus on the main pieces of assessment information.

● Item Color has been introduced on the Test Details and Item Edits screens for a test in order to

allow the user to visually identify the status of the items on the assessment.

○ Item colors indicate an item’s status as

follows:

○ Green: The item passes all validations

○ Orange: The item contains a warning

○ Red: The item contains an error

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Text to Speech Updates

Enhancements have been made to Text to Speech functionality to support not reading passage and

respecting answer choice scrambling.

● Text is Speech can be enabled to read all text including passages or all text except passages.

● To disable reading of passages, uncheck Enable TTS for Passages.

● This configuration is enabled by default.

● Text to Speech has been updated to respect the Scramble Answer Choice property and will read answer choices as they are listed when scrambled.

Force Submit Score Page Enhancement

An enhancement has been made to the Force Submit Score page for bulk online scoring.

● The Force Submit Score page has been enhanced to display the list of students that would be affected by forcing a score submission for In Progress tests

● The end user will have the ability to export the student list to an Excel file for further analysis

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 Force Publication Permission

The new Force Publication operation allows users to publish a test from Schoolnet to TestNav to ensure the

test is the same in both systems.

● This action can be performed on the Test Detail page when the normal publication options are

not available.

● The operation is limited to Leadership and System Operator roles.

● The action is available only when the level at which the operation is assigned (school or district)

matches the level of the test. This means that principals can't force publication of district tests.

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 Manually Scorable Questions Score Page Enhancements

The manually scorable questions tab has been updated based on customer feedback to allow for a more efficient user experience

● Student responses listed one after the other ● Question content shows collapsed by default ● The item passage has been removed to allow for the viewable screen space to be leveraged for

student responses and scoring ● Ability to navigate to the next or previous question via buttons at the bottom of the page ● Student full response or student notes available to be viewed ● Scoring instructions and /or exemplars are available under the question content

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 Updated Online Presentation for Matching items

The presentation of Matching items has been updated in TestNav.

● Previously, answer containers were displayed on top of the question containers, the layout has

been updated to show the answer containers in the left column and the question containers in

the right column.

● This update allows a greater number of answer containers to be easily viewed by students.

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 Configurable values for "Test", "Benchmark", and "Standardized"

The words "test", "benchmark", and "standardized" can be now be customized and displayed across the

Schoolnet application.

● While most customers have the concept of benchmark tests and standardized tests, some use

different names for them. Schoolnet now supports the naming conventions commonly used by

educators and students in those various organizations to reduce confusion on what type of tests

are being referred to.

● Schoolnet makes extensive use of the word "test" while some customers commonly use words

such as "assessment" or "examination". Schoolnet can now be configured to substitute any

synonym for the word "test" in the text displayed to students and educators.

● Requests to utilize this feature must be made via Client Services or the Schoolnet support team.

Customers are responsible for testing that the length of their selected words or phrases do not

adversely affect the Schoolnet user interface.

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 Hiding bubble-in student IDs on answer sheets

On answer sheets where the student ID was known, the student ID was encoded in both the pre-slugged

student ID bubbles and the QR code. We have now removed the pre-slugged student ID bubbles resulting in

space for more questions to fit on the answer sheet.

● Answer sheets where student IDs are known show the student ID underneath the student's

name instead of in a series of bubbles

● Answer sheets where student IDs are not known show the blank student ID bubbles which can

be filled in by a student or teacher, as was the case in previous versions of Schoolnet

● CAUTION: The same test now has two different answer sheet layouts, one with fillable student

ID bubbles and one with no student ID bubbles at all. The number of answer sheets constituting

a complete test may now differ between layouts; for example, the student ID bubbles layout

may require two pages while the more compact layout only requires one.

● CAUTION: Answer sheets printed prior to Schoolnet 21.0 cannot be used in Schoolnet 21.0

21.0 answer sheet with Student ID bubbles 21.0 answer sheet without Student ID bubbles

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 KPI Dashboard

KPI Dashboard Custom Spacers

Ability to create custom spacers on the KPI Dashboard

● An option to create a custom spacer using the Edit KPI Layout mode.

● The spacer can be strategically placed on the Dashboard amongst existing KPIs.

● The customized spacer support custom text, background colors, HTML, and embedded links.

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 System Enhancements

Expanded LMS integration support

Schoolnet now supports LTI integration with two additional LMS vendors, itslearning and Brightspace (D2L) in

addition to Canvas which has been supported in a previous release.

● A site can be configured to use a LMS integration by the system operator role using System:

General Settings

● Schoolnet assessments can be linked to the LMS allowing students to take the assessment from

within an LMS application.

● In the LMS, a user will link a test to the LMS by using the Schoolnet online passcode

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● All tests are delivered using TestNav and all Schoolnet test delivery features and items are

supported.

● Test scores are available in real time in Schoolnet and also in the LMS depending on the LMS

application settings.

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 Additional IIS Enhancements

Assessments

● Answer sheet generation for a test administered in a prior school year has been disabled. This can be enabled by a system operator under Assessment Admin Settings.

● Scrambled Answer choices are no longer shown as scrambled within the Cloud TestNav score page, they will be presented to the scorer as they were entered.

● Open Response text boxes, for both simple and rich text editor options, have been updated to

automatically expand as students enter their responses. These responses are then displayed in

larger text boxes to the scorers within the Cloud TestNav Score page.

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