Increasing Demands for Data
Modern responsive classroom environments are changing the way teachers teach and students learn, for the better. However, gathering the kind of timely data that enables useful formative feedback requires frequent assessments and prompt paper grading. That may seem like a fairly simple and easy solution on the surface.
In practice, though, this is one of those areas where educational strategy and classroom reality begin to conflict. More frequent tests and more rapid response times, not to mention ever-increasing class sizes and data requirements, often mean there is simply more work for teachers to accomplish than there is time in a day.
It’s no wonder that so many teachers are actively seeking some sort of easy grader solution to help streamline processes and save time. Unfortunately, it often seems like the kind of formative assessment tools that could actually help either don’t exist or are out of reach for most teachers. Ultimately, an easy grader that isn’t accessible or affordable isn’t truly easy.
Rising to the Challenge
In order for teachers to make informed decisions about lessons – like when to move forward in the curriculum and what content areas to revisit – they need formative feedback. And they need it fast. Unfortunately, while daily quizzes, unit assessments, and benchmark tests are all certainly important ways to gather information about student progress, grading papers, collating the results, and extracting useful data by traditional methods is very time-consuming.
For teachers and their students, that extra time makes an enormous difference. To compensate, teachers are staggering their test schedules, shortening their assessments, sacrificing their nights and weekends, and using easy grader teacher apps that can automate some processes. But what they really need is a way to work smarter instead of harder. Enter Gradient’s easy grader solution.
Gradient was specifically created to be an efficient, effective, and easy grader app for teachers that can lighten the load of the work they are already doing in their classrooms. Instead of expecting teachers to change their approach to classroom assessments, Gradient simply makes it faster and easier to accomplish each and every step of their current assessment processes.
From diverse question types and scan-and-score capabilities to instantaneous grade transfer, Gradient is an answer for so much more than just how to grade a test quickly. It allows teachers to completely customize assessment forms, print multiples on a page, link questions to existing or custom standards, insert answer keys into existing worksheets, laminate sheets for re-use, and even let students grade their own papers. Gradient’s robust reporting options automatically provide instantly meaningful, flexible, and sharable data. Now that’s an easy grader!
But perhaps the best part is that Gradient doesn’t require the purchase of any new equipment or proprietary forms. Forms can be printed on regular paper, and answer sheets can be scanned and scored using existing mobile and/or desktop device cameras.