ExACT

DirectAlign

Tailor-made for K-12 Assessment Publishers

DirectAlign, a premium feature of the ExACT Alignment System, provides assessment publishers with an extremely granular alignment for Outcome Based Education. Whether it’s for alignment to one specific standard for each grade/level/state/subject, or align a resource to the equivalent standard across all states, DirectAlign has you covered.

Direct Align Tool for a 1:1 Alignment

Is aligning to too many standards problematic? Assessment publishers come to EdGate needing to align their items to a specific standard so that students can be assessed on a distinct learning outcome. After all, assessment items are created to span a full range of cognitive demand categories.

If your like most, outcome-based education often involves a team of people, working backwards from each outcome. Curriculum is designed and then they determine what knowledge and skills will be required to reach each outcome. EdGate has designed DirectAlign to provide assessment publishers like you with an extremely granular alignment to solve this challenge.

How does DirectAlign work?

Depending on your preference, users can work one of two ways:

1

Your in-house expert can ‘DirectAlign’ content items standard-by-standard within the ExACT Alignment System. (This process works best if your team is very familiar with the state standards.)

2

Using the EdGate Taxonomy of K-12 education concepts, the ExACT Alignment System provides the ability for users to attach a concept (e.g. Pythagorean theorem) to a content item after which the content aligns to the appropriate learning standards. Your publisher narrows views the narrowed down alignment results, and chooses to accept all results, or uses the DirectAlign Feature to achieve pinpoint accurate 1:1 alignment outcomes. (This process works best with teams that are more familiar with educational concepts in general, rather than individual state standards.)

Taking a closer look at option #2. If you need to align grade 8 content about the Pythagorean theorem, your publisher can tag it with the following concept: - Geometry and Measurement/Understand and apply the Pythagorean Theorem.

Once the concept is applied, here are some of the standards alignment results in Alabama:

Informally justify the Pythagorean Theorem and its converse.
Apply the Pythagorean Theorem to find the distance between two points in a coordinate plane.
Apply the Pythagorean Theorem to determine unknown side lengths of right triangles, including real-world applications.

The EdGate ExACT Direct Alignment System will provide the option to DirectAlign an assessment item to one of the standards above.

*Note that EdGate provides standards in machine readable format, broken down to the lowest level “child standards.”