No Child Left Behind and its testing mandates have added many challenges to the lives of local educators. Much has been said about the substantive public policy matters related to NCLB, but relatively little attention has been focused on what potentially affects district-level educators the most; how much work is involved in riding herd over testing materials throughout the assessment process.
Measured Progress clients can breathe a little easier through the testing cycle, thanks to the Operational Enterprise System (OES). Even before NCLB was enacted, Measured Progress had the foresight to begin developing the OES to comprehensively manage the logistical and security processes needed to accommodate the exponential growth in the volume of testing materials that is the reality of the NCLB era. OES is a multi-module system that makes the flow of assessment materials accurate and worry-free for already overburdened local educators.
OES not only manages logistics, security, and accountability of materials from printing to post-test, long-term storage; it captures, generates, and retrieves data in real time at all points along the way. Measured Progress systems experts designed OES as a series of software modules, each of which manages specific aspects of the test material handling process.
iServices™, the E-commerce Web application for online client services, enables local educators to register students (even on the day of testing!), register for training sessions and workshops, verify enrollment, order additional materials, request post-testing material pickup, view shipping details, and make online corrections (if necessary) of student demographic information prior to reporting.
iCore™ master data base is a repository of information for educators at the state and local levels. iCore defines contract-specific business rules, product definitions, algorithms, and ratios. The information stored in iCore includes contacts, addresses, enrollments, test shipment orders, and quantities. iCore provides an interface for e-commerce reporting functions and data security; it also documents the date and time of transactions/events (material shipment, for example) and retains historical information (such as enrollment) for use in forecasting.
iTrack™ monitors the location of all secure and non-secure test materials, from document printing to long-term storage, including packing, outbound and return shipping, receiving, image scanning, and warehouse storage. In addition, iTrack identifies and validates the quality assurance process for all materials, controls packing quantities, authenticates the assignment of secure serial numbers to schools/districts, produces packing slips and shipment summary reports, records changes, and produces real-time discrepancy reports used to reconcile differences in test material counts between pre-test shipping and post-test receiving ¾of critical importance for secure, high-stakes tests.
iLogin™ is an automated accountability process that compares and validates shipped versus returned material quantities. iLogin reports the quantity shipped and quantity returned per school. Assessment materials are assigned secure serial numbers, which iLogin uses to report variations between materials shipped versus materials returned, and to issue itemized reports by school or district of materials received (or not received) by Measured Progress. This feature alone greatly simplifies the resolution of discrepancies with school or district officials.
ScanQuest™ electronically captures paper documents, turning them into color images in various formats and compression schemes. ScanQuest accepts data and image input from multiple commercial scanners, facsimiles, or servers, while providing automatic, multi-layered quality control. ScanQuest captures information from virtually any form and detects blank responses with 100% accuracy, improving internal efficiencies in processing problem answer documents, archiving and delivering complete imaged answer booklets for secure, online viewing¾a rapid, user-friendly feature in the event that there’s a need to see a particular answer document.
Distributed iScore™ is a Web-based application that allows qualified personnel to read and score student responses from multiple locations at any time. The system is a “thin client” solution (does not require downloading of software) that gives users quick and easy access through a multi-tiered, scalable architecture.
While based on proven practices in quality control, process improvement, and material handling/supply-chain management, OES is so far ahead of competitors’ systems that Patents are pending for the overall OES, as well as specifically for the ScanQuest module. OES enables Measured Progress clients and local-level educators to focus on teaching and learning—and leave the logistics of high-volume testing to us.
