What are Unit Diagnostics?
NoRedInk's Unit Diagnostics are baseline assessments to help you track student growth throughout the unit, much like a pre-assessment. They can be used to inform which skills you should target for Practice and Quick Write assignments throughout the unit.
A Unit Diagnostic is the recommended first step in building a writing and grammar skills unit cycle in NoRedInk. At the end of a unit, you can create a Growth Quiz to measure the same skills as the Unit Diagnostic. At the end of a unit, Growth Quiz scores can be compared directly to Unit Diagnostic results to assess how students grew.
Assigning a Unit Diagnostic
Teachers can either assign a Unit Diagnostic based on skills from within our Assignment Library or directly from a previous Planning Diagnostic.
We recommend choosing topics from within a single skill area (Pathway) to help keep students and their data focused. Learn more about how to assign a Unit Diagnostic here!
Student Experience
During the Unit Diagnostic, students progress through a series of set questions to assess their skill level on the assigned topics. These questions can come in a variety of types. For example, some might involve clicking, highlighting, drag-and-drop, or typing.
Submitted answers are scored right away, and after completing the assignment, students will be able to correct any questions they got incorrect during remediation. Curious to learn more? Check out this article to see the student experience of a Unit Diagnostic!
View Unit Diagnostic results
Unit Diagnostics are scored like traditional tests, with students graded based on correct answers out of the total questions answered.
Once the assignment is closed, you'll be able to view both whole-class trends and individual performance broken down by topic. You can find a breakdown of how to interpret and use Unit Diagnostic results here!
Best practices and tips: Build a unit
💡 After students complete the Unit Diagnostic, select Start Unit from your Assignments page to kick off a full unit cycle. Check out this article to learn more about creating units in NoRedInk.
- Look for trends in results data and leverage them in your instruction. For example, you can group students who fall into similar proficiency bands together to create specific assignments for different groups or individual students.
- Follow up with targeted skills practice assignments based on the results of your diagnostic to help students focus on topics that need improvement.
- Assess students’ growth at the end of your unit by assigning a parallel Growth Quiz and comparing results with the original Unit Diagnostic.