Wheeling and Mt. Prospect parents curious about how their children are faring in math or reading will soon find the answers on their home computers.
A software program called Managing Assessment Data for Education was created by Wheeling School District 21 and River Trails District 26 to let parents and teachers look at how one child or a group of children progress from year to year.
This fall, teachers will be able to access the data; next year, parents will receive passwords so they can check their child’s progress through the districts’ World Wide Web sites, said Bonnie Willy, District 26 director of education services.
“It allows us to track a student’s performance on a variety of different assessments,” Willy said.
The software program takes the state goals, such as reading comprehension or math computation, and tracks how a child is doing based on test scores and local assessments to give a thorough picture of each child’s performance.
The districts decided to collaborate when they found an Illinois State Board of Education program designed to track every child’s progress did not sort by categories the way they needed it to, Willy said.
“It didn’t allow us to desegregate by groups as needed, so finally we just gave up and built our own,” Willy said. “Now, we can find out how all the girls in 2nd grade and the gifted program did on problem solving, or how special education kids are doing.”
