TerraNova3 - testing information

Full bullet point summary, TerraNova3
CTB/McGraw-Hill
Document prepared for Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Schools
Assessment products to consider from CTB/McGraw-Hill:
TerraNova3 Complete Battery -- TerraNova3 Common Core -- InView
Acuity (optional by school) is an online or paper assessment instrument chosen by each school.
----------------------------------The new TerraNova Common Core from CTB is the right product at the right time. With content aligned to the
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) this new form of TerraNova features innovative items that deliver an authentic
measure of the higher order thinking skills and increased depth of knowledge highlighted by the CCSS.
TerraNova3 Common Core w InView
 Two Forms - Assess the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) using either Form 1 or Form 2 to measure student
growth from one form to another in a school year, or measuring growth from one year to the next using a single
Form.
 Up to Date - The 2011 Norms and scaling of the TerraNova3 Common Core assessments allows the WELS
schools to retain their historical/longitudinal data to show student growth over the years.
 New Item Types - The TerraNova3 Common Core items were specifically built to measure the new standards.
The tests include multiple choice, constructed response, extended response, and integrated performance tasks.
(Scoring allows for partial credit for partial understanding).
 Informing - Teacher’s value the item analysis level reporting when partial credit is earned. TerraNova3 reporting
really does “inform instruction”, especially when using the Objective Performance Index scores for students.
 Reporting –
o Objective and item level reporting show student mastery on both national and college & career ready
skills.
o New “Premier Home Report” provides greater detail at the objective performance level, and suggests
links to instructional sites parents can use to help their children. Lexile Scores and book titles for
“suggested reading” are listed for each child.
 Cognitive assessment – InView provides the important measure of aptitude necessary for academic success.
 Management of WELS assessments - CTB/McGraw-Hill enjoys a strong relationship with the ECRA Group in
managing the current WELS assessment program, and will continue to support their efforts going forward.
Acuity
Schools that are ready for online assessments, using the formative/diagnostic assessments that are
aligned to the common core state standards, can add this dimension of assessment working with CTB/McGrawschool on a school by school basis.
 College and Career Readiness Assessments – Whether you belong to a PARCC or SBAC state or want to measure
yourself on College and Career Readiness, CTB/McGraw-Hill has benchmark assessments for Mathematics and
English Language Arts in Grades 3-8 and are designed for measuring growth.
 Adaptive Assessments – Beginning fall of 2014, College and Career Readiness Assessments aligned to Smarter
Balanced Consortium blueprints will be adaptive and provide scale scores.
 Online test creation – the system will allow teachers and schools to create their own online assessments from
CTB’s item banks or from items created by teachers in the school.
CTB/McGraw-Hill Contact: Brian Bell at [email protected]
May 2014
Technology Overview
CTB.com/Acuity
1
Introduction
This document is intended to support school and district technology specialists who are managing Acuity®, including
systems administrators, network administrators, and/or network security administrators.
Acuity is a Web-based application delivered through commonly known Web browsers. Acuity functions on both
Apple® Macintosh® computers and Microsoft® Windows®-based PCs. Acuity uses a four-tiered architecture to deliver
assessments and related functionality to each user.
This document will provide:
• An overview of the Acuity four-tiered architecture
• Technology details and appliance requirements
The Acuity Four-Tiered System Architecture
Below is an illustration of the Acuity four-tiered architecture.
Tier 1
At the first tier, students complete assessments using an approved internet browser pointed to an Acuity “appliance”
(Web server) provided by CTB.
Tier 2
At the second tier, as part of the implementation of Acuity, an appliance is placed in each school district’s computer
center. Working within the school computer network, students connect to the Acuity system through this Acuity
appliance on an approved Internet browser. When a student completes an assessment, the Acuity appliance submits
the student’s responses by sending the communication back to secure servers on the third tier.
Teachers and administrators also log into the Acuity system through the same Acuity appliance to manage student
rosters, assign tests, view reports, etc. Note: The use of this Acuity appliance greatly minimizes the Internet
bandwidth needed by schools or districts to access Acuity. For the entire duration of an assessment, students are
primarily using their district’s Local- or Wide-Area Network (LAN or WAN) for all content—not depending solely on
the district’s Internet connection.
Tier 3
At the third tier, student results are submitted to centrally hosted servers in The McGraw-Hill Companies secure
hosting facilities. These servers process and submit results to the fourth tier.
Tier 4
Finally, at the fourth tier, student results are stored and processed in Oracle® databases.
2
The Acuity appliance that is placed inside the school or district computing center is an industry standard “1U” server.
This appliance will be accompanied with two- or four-post rails that will accommodate most standard server racks.
These appliances are generally servers in the Dell PowerEdge® family. Depending on the number of desktop/laptop
computers to be served, CTB will choose an appropriate server for your needs.
Appliance Type 1
One 2.4 GHz quad-core Intel® Xeon® processor, 2 GB of RAM, single disk, dual gigabit network interface cards
(bonded), with a single power supply.*
These appliances typically handle up to 500 concurrent users at any given time. As an example, if a district owns
a total of 50 student computers per school and 50 students at each school are each using a single computer
simultaneously while taking an Acuity Assessment, the associated Acuity appliance will support up to 10 schools.
Depending on the number of concurrent connections, network congestion, and bandwidth availability, the number of
supported schools could increase or decrease.
Appliance Type 2
Two2GHzquad-coreIntelXeonprocessors,8GBofRAM,mirroreddisks,dual1Gbit/snetworkinterfacecards,dual
hot-swappablepowersupplies.Thisserverrequires1Uofrackspace.
Theseserverstypicallyhandleupto2100concurrentstudents.Byestimatingthateachschoolhasapproximately60
studentcomputers,theseserverscansupport4–35schools(dependingonconcurrencyandactualnumberofstudent
computers). This appliance server can work for multiple schools if the appliance server is centrally located and the
schoolseachhaveappropriatebandwidthbacktotheapplianceserver.Schooldistrictswithupto40schoolshave
successfully used Acuity district wide with only one server.
Bandwidth Requirements
A10Mbps/sEthernetconnectionfromeachcomputertoAcuityapplianceistheminimumrequirementyourschoolor
district network will need. The Acuity appliance is on the school network and all content is local. Your school or district
will also use its own LAN/WAN, which significantly minimizes your bandwidth usage to the Internet.
Appliance Maintenance
The appliances placed in schools or districts remain the property of The McGraw-Hill Companies and are maintained
by CTB technology specialists. Our specialists perform all upgrades of content, upgrades of software, upgrades of
operating systems, systems tuning, etc. Most of this maintenance is done overnight.
Toperformmaintenance,CTBtechnologyspecialistsneedaccesstotheserverthroughport22forSSHandSCP.
This port needs to be opened through a district’s firewall for proper updating of the server.
In addition, the server is monitored each hour through a URL check by a service called Nagios. If the URL does not
respondproperly,CTBisnotifiedimmediatelysocorrectiveactioncanbetaken.Forthismonitoring,port80isrequired
to be open through the district’s firewall to the outside world.
Iftheappliancehasanytypeofhardwarefailure,CTBwillshipanewserverviaexpeditedcarrier,pre-configuredto
the malfunctioning appliance’s network settings.
CTBwillrequiretheschoolordistricttoreturntheimpairedappliancewithin48hoursofreceiptofthereplacement
appliance. Upon notification of installation of the new appliance, CTB technology specialists will perform “final setup”
steps to connect the Acuity appliance to the Acuity system.
4
Appliance and Network Security
The Acuity appliance is connected to a school or district’s network through multiple internal network cards.
We strongly recommend patching each of these network cards for redundancy purposes, ideally to unique
switches on a single network rail. These network cards are bonded together at the operating system level to
serve as a single “virtual” interface. The preferred connection speed for these network cards is 1000 Mbps,
full duplex.
CTBrequireseachschooldistricttoprovideonestatic(non-DHCP)IPaddresstobeassignedtotheAcuity
appliance. If a school district uses NAT or a private IP address scheme internally, CTB will need this internal
IPaddresstobeassignedtotheservermappedtoanexternal(public)IPaddresseitherthroughthedistrict’s
firewall or directly through a router.
Connections to the appliance internally (by the users) is via port 80/HTTP.
ConnectionsfromtheappliancetoCTB“host”serversviatheInternetisviaport443/SSL.Connectionsinto
theserverfromTheMcGraw-Hillnetworkswillbecarriedoutoverport80/HTTPandport22/SSHfromThe
McGraw-Hill Companies IP address ranges.
TheserverisaLinux-basedserverrunningApacheWebserverandTomcatJavaservletprocessor.Itnormally
runsbetweenthreeandfiveload-balancedJVMs(JavaVirtualMachines).Theserverlogsactivity,including
JavaandInternetaccessandconnectionattempts.Theserveralsorunsitsownfirewall(iptables)where
public availability is restricted to port 80 and ICMP Ping on the local network. Port 22 is restricted to The
McGraw-Hill Companies networks.
The security of the Acuity server is paramount to CTB/McGraw-Hill. In the event of a suspected violation,
CTB will immediately investigate, possibly shut down the server, and notify your school district’s technology
staff regarding immediate assistance needed in solving the security issue.
Tier 3 Business Logic Server
ServicesatTier3consistofanumberofredundantserversor“hosts”housedinTheMcGraw-HillCompanies
securedatacenters.EachAcuityappliancethatisdeployedtoaschooldistrictcommunicateswithapoolof
assigned servers. These pools of servers at Tier 3 are load-balanced for high availability should a server fail.
ThesebusinesslogicserverscommunicateinturnwiththeTier4databaseservers.Schooldistrictshaveno
accesstotheseserversexceptthroughtheirAcuityapplianceserver.
Tier 4 Database Server
The Tier 4 database servers are a redundant cluster of Oracle databases.
Schooldistrictshavenodirectaccesstotheseservers.Theseserversarewherestudentdataarestoredand
where teachers get the information for their reports.
For additional questions and technical support related to Acuity, please call 800.282.4123.
5
Technical Specifications
Acuity provides a similar customer experience for both Windows® and Macintosh® computers. The following detail
recommended minimum hardware and software requirements to support the Acuity system.
Additional
Software
Multimedia
Browser
Network
Operating Systems /
Hardware
Macintosh
PC
Mac OSX® 10.5 running on Macintosh recommended
minimum system requirements.
Microsoft® Windows XP, Windows 7 running on
Microsoft recommended minimum system
requirements.
Mouse/pointer
Display resolution of 1024 x 768 is required for viewing interactive items.
LAN connected (TCP/IP 10/100 MBs)
LAN connected (TCP/IP 10/100 MBs)
Ability to by-pass proxy. It is recommended to bypass proxies but in the event this is not an option we prefer to
work with a school/district network contact to verify functionality before a school goes live with the application.
Safari 5 or Firefox 8 or Chrome 15
Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 8 or Chrome 15
Cookies enabled
AutoComplete set to “off”
NOTE: Firefox must be used for item authoring.
Cookies enabled
AutoComplete set to “off”
ActiveX enabled
Ability to allow pop-ups
Adobe® Flash® Player 9.0
Adobe® Flash® Player 9.0
QuickTime® 7.1.5 for sound files.
RealPlayer 6, or Windows Media® Player 10
NOTE: QuickTime must be the system default for
MIME-type MP3 in order for the application audio files
to function properly.
NOTE: Windows Media or RealPlayer must be the
system default for MIME-type MP3 in order for audio
files to function properly
Adobe® Reader 8
Adobe® Reader 8
For the Classroom Matrix report specifically,
Microsoft® Excel version 2004 or later for MAC must
be installed and accessible from a user’s computer.
For the Classroom Matrix report specifically, Microsoft®
Excel version 2003 or later must be installed and
accessible from a user’s computer.
Copyright ©2012 by CTB/McGraw-Hill LLC. Individuals may copy, download, and/or print this document. Acuity and the Acuity logo are trademarks of The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All other brand names and product names are properties of their respective owners and are not associated with the publisher
of this document.
6

Download Report