How Pear Assessment is Setting the Curve on Assessments

Summer has come and gone, and we’re now well into the 2023-2024 school year. Welcoming you back to the classroom, as always, is Pear Assessment (formerly Edulastic), setting the curve on assessments with smart tech designed to optimize your teaching.

Improving the assessment experience for students

We’ve updated our accommodations capabilities to support all learners. Here’s an overview of all exciting new updates from 2023: 

We've enabled an audio response question type, allowing students to vocally answer questions (Enterprise only). In addition to this, we've integrated Microsoft Immersive Reader and introduced settings that allow admins to bulk configure which students can receive Text-To-Speech on assignments.

We’ve also introduced the ability to allow multiple calculators on assessments, including a basic, scientific, and Desmos calculator.

We recently introduced Video Quiz, a new video-based assessment format that allows teachers to turn their favorite videos into formative assessments. With Video Quiz, you can create your own questions or tap into generative A.I. to do so for you. It’s also built with YouTube Player for Education, so students and teachers can enjoy an ad- and recommendation-free viewing experience that doesn’t distract students from learning.

Build, deploy, and manage common assessments across the district

Pear Assessment is proud to support end-to-end common formative assessment flows, enabling district administrators to centrally deploy assessments to classrooms with new capabilities.

Assessment authors have always been able to source items from our Public Library, Pear Assessment Certified library, and other accessible item banks through Pear Assessment. While these items are suitable for most scenarios, there are times when districts desire test items from a specific, district-approved item bank. To accommodate this, we've allowed admins to hide non-essential item banks.

Additionally, we’ve simplified the process of finding and selecting specific grades, schools, classes, or student groups. Assigning an assessment to a specific class can be daunting for districts with numerous schools and hundreds of classrooms. With our recent update, assigning assessments to individual classrooms is now just a few clicks away.

For common assessments featuring constructed response questions requiring manual grading, we've empowered admins to permit teachers to access and grade these questions in real time , even before the testing window concludes. This provides teachers with added flexibility to assess and formulate feedback for students.

In the near future, assessment authors can add and configure test sections within their assessments, reflecting the types of testing experiences students might face in state exams.

Lastly, to effectively manage an expanding collection of assessments, we've introduced Test IDs. These are unique identifiers for every test or assignment created, acting as a sort of digital signature. As tests are shared amongst teachers and staff, the source Test ID does not change, making it easier to keep track of and search for the source test. Additionally, schools can now label common assessments as district or school assessments , making it easier to differentiate between use cases. 

Data sets

To support schools' desire to run reports on larger data sets, we've made significant upgrades to enhance the load time for these data sets. This speeds up identifying trends and anomalies across a vast amount of assessment data.

Centralize all your data

The Data Studio enables education leaders to centralize assessment data with external data resources like attendance records, diagnostic tests, and state assessments. This integration promotes a proactive strategy to assist students in greatest need. Intuitive drill-down features allow for viewing reports from the student, sub-group, classroom, school, district, and state levels . Additionally, users can apply more detailed filters to analyze assessment data by specific demographics, such as IEPs, free/reduced lunch, and ELL status.