ERB Insights Blog
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By Glenn Milewski and Adrienne Hu Introduction At ERB, our goal is to help schools see the potential in every student. We believe a great way to do this is by offering assessments at various points of a student’s career and enabling educators to explore and extract insight from assessment data using 360 Access. One way our members understand student learning is by comparing their assessment results to ERB norms. The purpose of norms is to describe the test performance of a reference group of test-takers. Norms are useful only insofar as the data sets used to compute them represent […] read more
Tuesday, March 22 11:30 am ET / 8:30 am PT Understanding ERB’s Updated Norms Please join us for a conversation between Glenn Milewski, Chief Program Officer at ERB, and Jason Lasnetski, Senior Member Services Director about the newly updated Independent School and Association Norms that have been released for Spring. Glenn and Jason will be discussing which norms were updated, changes to how norms are calculated, and the impact we saw from Covid. Watch a recording of this webinar here. Tagged in: […] read more
Managing your contacts within ERB’s Member Profile is simple and ensures that you and your colleagues are receiving the information you need from ERB. Go to https://memberprofile.erblearn.org/help-usermanage for a quick guide on the difference between contacts and user roles, and how to create, edit, and deactivate contacts. […] read more
Updated manuals for WrAP testing are now available on the home page and under the Resources tab. […] read more
ERB member schools and new contacts added to your ERB account will receive critical communications from ERB. This includes the monthly Insights Newsletter and important program or account updates. If you would like to make changes to this and select which communications you receive from ERB, please be sure to update your preferences in the communication preferences section of your member profile here. Below is a list of the communications we send: Membership – You are automatically opted in to receive important account information and updates, and cannot remove yourself from this, however you can unsubscribe yourself to further updates […] read more
erb + test innovators
Students, parents, schools, and access organizations will benefit from ERB’s new offering, which focuses on test familiarization, anxiety reduction, confidence building, and learning resources.
New Updates to Milestones Norms for Fall 2022 Milestones is an interim assessment of reading and mathematics that complements the CTP. When it was first launched in the fall of 2020, ERB used CTP data to construct Milestones norms. This was appropriate given that Milestones and CTP share the same score scale and use very similar test specifications. After two years of administration, ERB determined that it collected sufficient data to construct norms based on actual Milestones test-takers. These norms better reflect students’ performance on Milestones and are more useful to members interpreting results. ERB will keep adding years to the Milestones norm […] read more
CTP Norms Fall 2022 As the 2022-2023 school year gets underway, we want to update you on the latest with CTP norms and explain how we developed the current CTP norms in relation to pre and post-pandemic data. CTP norms for the fall 2021 test administrations were frozen due to anomalies in the fall 2020 data (e.g., low volume, non-representative samples, and COVID disruptions). Norms were unfrozen in the fall of 2022 given: the desire for members to understand performance in relation to the pandemic context, and a rebound in test taking that occurred as members adapted to schooling during […] read more
What is PEG™? PEG, or Project Essay Grade, is the automated scoring system at the core of ERB Writing Practice. It was invented in the 1960s by Ellis Batten Page, a former high school English teacher, who spent “many long weekends sifting through stacks of papers wishing for some help.” His guiding principles? 1) the more we write, the better writer we become, and 2) computers can grade as reliably as their human counterparts (Page, 2003). The state of computers at the time of Page’s invention did not leave much room for automation, so PEG lay dormant until the mid-1980s. […] read more
An award-winning automated scoring algorithm. Project Essay Grade® (PEG®) software is an automated essay scoring solution based on more than 40 years of research by Dr. Ellis Batten Page, whose pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics has distinguished him as the leader of computer-based essay scoring. Using advanced, proven statistical techniques, PEG analyzes written prose, calculates measures that reflect the intrinsic characteristics of writing (fluency, diction, grammar, construction, etc.), and models the decisions of professional readers to produce scores that deliver unparalleled accuracy and reliability. PEG’s scoring results have been validated in more independent studies than all other […] read more
ERB Launches Writing Practice with new design, functionality, and enhanced features to help students improve their writing skills with instant, actionable feedback. A robust library of prompts and lessons saves educators time while providing students unlimited opportunities to practice writing. ERB announced today the availability of ERB Writing Practice, an online program designed to help students improve their writing skills through practice, feedback, and guided support backed by the industry’s most accurate automated scoring algorithm. ERB Writing Practice helps educators and families save valuable time while giving students immediate and individualized feedback and opportunities for growth. Why ERB Writing Practice? […] read more
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