Aligning Standards and Setting Up Properties for Your Items

You can use the Item Properties panel in the toolbar to align your items to standards and to enter other helpful details, such as the subject and grade levels an item belongs to.

Standards identify the specific skills or areas of knowledge that an item measures. Aligned standards will appear in the reports for Authoring tests, helping you pinpoint the specific areas in which a student may be excelling or may need additional support. The properties you set up for items also make it easier to filter items when adding them to tests or locating them on the Items tab.

Item properties can be entered at any point while an item has a Draft status. However, once an item is added to a test and the test is published, the item status changes to Published and its properties will be locked, along with its content.

You can use the Item Properties panel to set up the following properties for your items:

• Item Name: In the Item Name field, enter a unique name for the item.
• Grade: In the Grades section, mark the checkbox for each grade level the item should be associated with.
• Subject: From the Subject drop-down, select the subject to which the item belongs.
• Primary Standard: In the Primary Standard section, do one of the following:
  • If you know the ID for the standard you want to align to the item, click the Quick Key tab, then enter the key in the search field. You can copy a standard’s ID from the Standards panel.
  • If you don’t know the ID for the standard you want to align to the item, select the appropriate standard categories from the drop-downs provided on the Guided tab. Then click Align for the standard you selected.
  • If a standard is already aligned to the item, you can click Change Standard to align a different standard, if necessary.
• Secondary Standard: You can align the item to additional standards in the Secondary Standard field by following the same process used to align the primary standard.
• Description: In the Description field, enter a user-friendly description for the item.
• Difficulty Level: From the Difficulty Level drop-down, select whether the item is intended to be easy, moderate, or difficult.
• Keywords: Keywords allow you to search for items on the Items tab. To add a new keyword, enter it in the Keywords field and click Add. To remove a keyword, click beside that keyword.
• Source: You can use the Source field to explain the origin of any reading passage or other media you add to an item. For example, you could note whether a reading passage is from the public domain.