Admin Guide to Skills Benchmarks

NoRedInk Skills Benchmarks provide administrators with powerful tools to monitor student progress toward mastery of standards-aligned writing skills! These benchmarks also deliver valuable data that enables teachers to make meaningful and informed instructional decisions throughout the academic year. If your instructional team has decided to implement NoRedInk Skills Benchmarks, check out the resources below to learn more about implementing this tool!  

Creating a Skills Benchmark

❗ The ability to create Benchmarks requires access to our Admin Tools. Check out this article to learn how to gain administrator access in NoRedInk!

Once you've decided that Skills Benchmarks are aligned with your school or district's educational goals for the year, it's time to create one for your schools! You can choose from either a pre-made standards-aligned Benchmark or create a custom-made Benchmark. 

The Skills Benchmark created will be assigned to the schools and grade level chosen during setup, and teachers will begin seeing a notification 3 weeks before the administration window opens. For step-by-step instructions on creating your Skills Benchmark, you can check out this article!

Administration Best Practices

Looking for ways to ensure smooth implementation, maximize student participation, and generate meaningful data? This article provides comprehensive guidance for school leaders implementing NoRedInk Skills Benchmarks. In this article, you'll find implementation advice for the entire benchmark process, including:

• Pre-administration preparation
• Administration monitoring
• Accessing results

Reviewing Benchmark Data

When it comes to reviewing Skills Benchmark data as an administrator, you can:

• Drill down into benchmark results by school, teacher, class, and individual student
• View topic-by-topic performance breakdowns
• See how student performance aligns with your standards at each level

To ensure you and your teachers can use this data meaningfully to inform instruction, we recommend taking the following steps:

• Review high-level trends: Identify patterns across schools, grade levels, and skill areas to understand strengths and challenges.
• Schedule professional development: Plan dedicated training sessions for teachers on how to use Benchmark results to drive instruction.
• Time your professional development strategically: Conduct PD between mid-September and mid-October, after administering the Benchmark.

This ensures your benchmark data becomes a meaningful tool for instructional planning! These steps can help teachers interpret and translate data insights into targeted interventions and instructional adjustments that support student writing development throughout the year.

Supporting Teachers 

Some of the most common mistakes we see administrators making during this phase of Benchmark implementation are in terms of expectation setting and follow-through. To ensure your teachers and students are set up for success during the Benchmark administration process, check out our article on supporting teachers during a Skills Benchmark!

Measuring Progress

The final step in this process is to schedule and administer a follow-up Benchmark if you have not already. This process will be similar to the steps outlined above:

1. Create and schedule a follow-up Benchmark that directly aligns with the Benchmark administered earlier in the year.
2. Share Benchmark directions and expectations with teachers (again, we recommend a 2-week administration window).
3. Review high-level trends.

4. Lastly, it could be vital for future Benchmarks to capture additional feedback from teachers regarding the process. What went well? What could help this process run smoothly in the future?

💡 One piece of feedback we've received is having NoRedInk embedded into pacing guides helped teachers prioritize what content to teach during each semester.