In our last post, we related Spotlight’s 2021 highlights, including our acquisition by Pearson and the tremendous growth in the impact we’re making on students and families.
Here we’ll go more in-depth, sharing some examples of the work we’ve done and the impact we’re making.
First, our partnership with the West Virginia Department of Education. Their video report, which we distributed to nearly 100,000 students’ families in both English and Spanish, is a celebration of state pride. The kayaker’s journey down the New River is a depiction of one of that state’s many natural wonders, and serves as a metaphor for a student’s educational journey, replete with partnership and support.
In nearby Virginia we’re helping to make the “Student Detail by Question” report understandable to all kinds of families. The “SDBQ” is a richly informative report, but it’s complicated, so our video does just what a teacher or counselor would do if they could take time and speak personally with every student’s caregiver: It walks them through the report, piece by piece, pointing out what they should focus on — and how they might help their student with targeted resources.
Similarly, in Illinois and New Jersey we’re making conventional score reports ("Individual Student Reports,” or “ISRs” in assessment parlance) understandable to a wide range of families by explaining them in a wide range of languages; Spanish, of course, but French too, as well as languages with a variety of different alphabets: Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) — all of these and more, each narrated by a native-speaking voice actor. (As you’ll see in Illinois’ report, we also take the opportunity to help families understand how the state’s schools have responded to the COVID pandemic.)
And across the country, we continued our three-pronged partnership with ETS, with whom we’ve now custom-created video reports for three different assessments: CAASPP, the statewide math-and-ELA test; Initial ELPAC, taken by students as they enter the state’s English-language instruction program; and Summative ELPAC, taken by those same students at the end of the year; in all three cases, Spotlight’s video reports help parents and caregivers understand how best to support their child’s learning.
We invite you to review these videos, and to imagine: How would you put our technology to work to help all kinds of stakeholders understand their personal learning data? (Though you should know: you’ll have to get in the line that’s formed for personalized video reports in 2022!)