Boosting Student Achievement with IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot

N

12

Academic Achievement; Achievement Tests; Computer Uses in Education; Elementary School Students; Middle School Students; Mathematics Achievement; Probability; Scores; Diagnostic Tests; Student Evaluation; Evaluation Methods

IXL is an end-to-end teaching and learning solution that engages learners in grades Pre-K through 12 with a comprehensive curriculum and a first-of-its-kind assessment suite. A core component of IXL's assessment suite is the IXL Diagnostic, an interim assessment designed by a team of educators and mathematicians that uses Item Response Theory (Lord, 1980) to automatically adjust question difficulty based on students' response patterns. The diagnostic can be used in two ways. In "Real-Time" mode, IXL's Diagnostic provides students and educators with in-the-moment information about students' subject area knowledge, which is extremely helpful for daily instruction. In "Snapshot" mode, the diagnostic serves as a flexible, lightweight benchmark assessment that is designed to be used one or more times during the school year to easily assess and track students' grade-level proficiency over time. After completing the diagnostic--either in Real-Time or Snapshot mode--students receive personalized action plans that help them close gaps quickly. The goal of the present study was to investigate the impact of completing IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot on student learning and achievement in grades 3 through 8. Using assessment data from four states (NY, TN, OK, and WI), we compared the math achievement of grade cohorts that completed at least one Snapshot during the 2021-22 school year to comparable grade cohorts that used IXL but did not complete a Snapshot during this time. Using 2021 assessment performance as pretest and 2022 assessment performance as posttest, we found that using IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot improves student math achievement. Grade cohorts that completed IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot performed better on their state math assessments than comparable IXL grade cohorts that did not complete IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot. Specifically, the proficiency rate was about three percentage points higher for Snapshot cohorts, relative to comparable IXL cohorts that did not complete the Snapshot.

As Provided

2023

ED630555