Congratulations on reaching the half-way mark of the school year! Not only is January a new year, but it’s mid-year through the academic calendar. This mile-marker is a good spot to assess progress so that you can celebrate the accomplishments or make adjustments to reach your goals by the end of the year.
Why Conduct Assessments
Any long-term goal requires a series of steps to achieve, and it’s important to measure progress along the way. How well did you complete the last step? Are you ready for the next step? Just as the academic classroom includes assessments to determine students’ grasp of the units, so should you assess your program.
The results of an assessment offer insights into the success of your program so that you can make better decisions about where to focus your efforts. For example, should you keep focusing on a particular skill, or do you need to step back and develop more foundational skills first? Are you on track to move through the units, or should you add more or remove some?
The Goal of Assessment
Metrics are important indicators for determining progress, and data driven decisions have become the norm. Within this world of measurements and datapoints is a term worth learning called Delta, and it stands for the amount of change that occurs. In other words, this metric pinpoints the before and after effects of your program.
When the merit of a program stands on its transformative success, you want to capture the before-and-after changes that occur. You need to know how far you’ve come and where your students are in their transformation.
But you don’t have to be a data analyst to do this!
Easy to Use Reporting
Instead of struggling to design your own Skillastics® progress report, allow us to help you. We have created two easy to use tools to help you assess your program and or your staff. The Skillastics Physical Activity Instructor Evaluations assesses your staff and the Skillastics Pre-Post Test helps assess your student’s attitudes. You’ll gain immediate insights about your work so far with easy to read results so that you don’t need to be an expert in statistics to understand the outcome.
The results of our free Progress Report will help you plan for the next half of the school year and make the most of your time. In the end, your students will benefit most from a program evaluation that stays on track and meets its goals.
About the Author
Sandy Slade is the CEO & Founder of Skillastics®, the #1 on-site and virtual physical activity resource for groups of children of all sizes. The on-site programs are designed around Skillatsics Activity Kits. These Activity kits include an innovative technique of play, executed on an oversize mat, where up to 100 children can play at one time.
The virtual programs provide students with an amazing variety of physical activity experiences that consist of 30 days of content lasting 30-40 minutes a day taught by national experts.
Skillastics® is enjoyed by over 10 million students in more than 25,000 Physical Education and After School settings nationwide.
For more information, email info@skillastics.com or check out www.skillastics.com.
