Using IXL for Diagnosing Learning & Targeted Practice

It’s progress monitoring season. The state requires it: three times a year, we have to collect data on how our students are doing in math and literacy. But progress monitoring also makes sense. The fall progress monitoring data is our starting place; it's a snapshot of how all our students in each grade are doing. And while this data - whether it’s a Lexile score or a “pinpoint” number that IXL generates - is neither perfect nor showing us the whole story, it does provide a gateway to asking more questions about what is working and not working for our students. 

This year, we’re using IXL for progress monitoring in math. Last spring and summer, a group of teachers, instructional coaches, tech interventionists, and district leaders met with people from IXL to develop a plan for how to most effectively use IXL for progress monitoring as well as recommendations for its use as part of teaching and intervention. The group decided to use a function called "Snapshot" as our progress monitoring tool. As its name implies, Snapshot gives us information on a student's overall math level at one moment in time. This is a broad strokes assessment, and therefore, helpful for progress monitoring.

IXL also provides tools that can be helpful to teachers in identifying specific areas that students need more support and targeted practice.  The Real Time Diagnostic (RTD) is a second IXL assessment tool, which we'll explore a bit more here.

The RTD as a Diagnostic Tool

Earlier this week, I talked with Jim Monahan of Edmunds Middle about his experience using IXL. He had his students spend up to 45 minutes initially answering questions in the RTD, so that IXL can get a clear picture of what their strengths and math gaps are. Thereafter, he has students students spend 10 minutes a week answering questions in the RTD, and 10-15 minutes working on one of the areas of targeted practice that IXL provides based on the student’s demonstrated gaps. Note that the program recommends a goal of 15 questions per week; our recommendation is based on time not number of questions. The time students spend in the RTD keeps the program's profile of the student current; having students return to the “diagnostic arena" weekly ensures that the practice sessions better reflect current student skill. Providing specific time for the student to practice one skill area helps keep the intervention practice manageable for students.  Jim also found that the Snapshot (our progress monitoring tool) took very little time for students who had consistently been “entering the diagnostic arena” - the IXL term for using the RTD -- once a week. 

Here it's important to underscore that no computer program is a substitute for high-quality, culturally responsive grade-level instruction that is differentiated with multiple access points for learners who are known well by their teacher. And we don't want students to continue to practice math that they don't understand, no matter how "targeted" that practice is. The data that IXL provides must be monitored and analyzed by the student's teacher. Which students could benefit from a 1:1 or small group re-teaching? Which students continue to practice the same skill without seeing any improvement? That's a flag for a teacher intervention.

All this is to say that IXL can be a useful supplement to daily instruction, practice and feedback in the classroom. In a future post, I’ll highlight some of the ways that IXL can be used as formative assessment in order to tailor classroom-based interventions for grade-level math.