10 Study Island Features You Need To Know About

As an educator, you know the 21st century classroom is dynamic, demanding, and constantly evolving. That’s why Study Island is committed to evolving with you by promising to bring you simple technology, quality content, and actionable data to support your students’ success.

We’ve listened to your feedback and recently launched a fresh user-friendly look, added features to improve the scoring model, and enhanced functionality for your favorite Study Island staples. Whether you’ve been with Study Island for years, or are just now unlocking its potential, we guarantee there’s always more to learn. After combing through items from this summer’s release and adding in a few lesser-known customer favorites, we’ve arrived at 10 of Study Island's best features that will enrich your classroom teaching and drive your students’ success.

1. Group Sessions

Want to get a pulse on if your students understand the standard you taught just yesterday? Start with a Group Session to see if any reteaching is necessary before building on that prior knowledge. With our no-clicker-required Group Sessions, students can submit real-time responses to multiple choice and interactive, technology-enhanced questions via our Group Session feature. These collaborative practice sessions enable teacher-led, standards-based practice and learning that keeps students engaged while also tracking their progress towards mastery in real time.

2. Built Tests

Create, customize, and distribute standards-based tests leveraging a robust pool of practice and assessment items with our Test Builder tool. Built Tests will help you quickly and easily design tests to leverage for classroom formative assessments or district-level benchmarking. Built Tests can also be launched in a Group Session environment for more collaborative practice with your students. This is useful for reviewing recent assessments or to practice test questions together as a class. Whether as a school administrator you want to build tests that can be used by all teachers across certain grade level, or as a classroom teacher you want your very own Built Tests for regular progress monitoring at the end of each week, this flexible tool allows you to do both (and a lot more).

3. Teacher Dashboard known as Sensei

You already know formative assessments will allow you to guide and inform instruction, but gathering, deciphering and implementing student data can be time consuming. Luckily, Study Island already automatically gathers and sorts your student data for you. Edmentum Sensei allows you to analyze your class data with charts, graphs, and visual cues. This format allows you to quickly and efficiently access and optimize your classroom data, so you can take action faster and accelerate student achievement. You can review class progress across multiple subjects or deep-dive into individual standards or topics, and use student cards to drive meaningful student reflection, monitor progress, and measure proficiency.

4. Trusted Standards Alignment

Study Island is a leader in customizable, standards-based content. To help you easily identify how each topic is aligned, specific grade-level standards for your state can be viewed in the main area that houses all of your practice topics, also known as a Topic Tree. Next to each topic, you’ll find your standard code. With one click, both students and educators can read the details of that specific standard to get a clearer picture of what will be covered in that practice session. It’s not enough for practice to be standards-aligned however; it also needs to be high quality. Study Island leverages a robust item bank that is constantly being added to and updated. Within this rich pool, you’ll find over 10,000 technology-enhanced items covering 13 different item types to promote higher-order thinking and inquiry. Targeting the standards you want to teach and incorporating the items that are appropriate for your learners is easy.

5. District- and Building-Level Reporting

Study Island includes over 18 highly customizable, real-time reports to help educators monitor progress, identify areas needing additional practice, and individualize instruction based on student need. For example, the Class GradeBook Report provides a great overview into how students are preforming in Study Island, while the Individual Student report is a great report to use in parent meetings. Our district-level reports ensure that you have the districtwide information needed to guide data-driven decision making; provide efficient student-level, grade-level, and district wide support; and implement swift and effective interventions.

6. Teacher Toolkit

We understand no two students learn in quite the same way. This is when the Teacher Toolkit comes in handy—give those tactile learners hands-on practice or try a video for your visual learners. The Teacher Toolkit gives you more than enough options to choose from, providing easy access to Study Island’s extensive library of thousands of K–12 learning resources. With a quick search, teachers can access lesson plans, Khan Academy videos, PhET virtual science labs and more!

7. Writing Assignments

All students need practice building their communication skills through effective writing, but creating meaningful writing assignments can be challenging. Study Island includes elementary, middle, and high school narrative, expository, persuasive, and instructional writing prompts for ELA. And since writing shouldn’t just be happening in your reading block, we offer math and science writing prompts too. You can even create your own writing prompts or choose one of our pre-written prompts (built-in rubrics included!).

8. Class Manager

When you start building classes, Study Island’s functionality really takes off. Use Class Manager to define your classes, then manage preferences, build specific assignments based on student needs, and pull class level reports. When students navigate to their classes page, they can see what assignments are available for them to work on sorted by due date and send messages to you regarding any questions they may have. Additionally, leverage class manager to bolster communication with parents. You can quickly set up parent notifications to celebrate successes, send regular progress updates, or share reminders about upcoming assignments.

9. NWEA MAP Link

For any NWEA MAP users, we offer an exclusive partnership that leverages your data to drive student learning. Study Island and NWEA customers can easily pinpoint academic strengths and weaknesses through NWEA MAP test results and then automatically target those areas with Study Island’s rigorous, standards-based content. The NWEA MAP Link is available in math for grades 2-11 and in reading for grades 2-12. Study Island is also the exclusive NWEA MAP for Science partner, aligned to NGSS and available for grades 3-8.

10. Blue Ribbon Tracking

Any seasoned Study Island user knows that Blue Ribbons are a game changer. To inspire learning, students can earn Blue Ribbons any time they demonstrate mastery on a Study Island topic. We know you love to motivate your students to keep practicing with classroom incentives and contests based on Blue Ribbons, which is why we’ve made it even easier to monitor how many your students have earned. From the student homepage, your learners can monitor their total ribbon count alongside the number earned per subject in real time. Additionally, we just launched a new student and teacher report that allows each group to view total ribbons earned across all programs your school or district has access to.

At Edmentum, we are always pushing ourselves to meet educators’ and students’ ever-changing needs. Throughout Study Island’s history, the program has evolved from a supplemental resource for test preparation to a comprehensive tool for classroom practice and assessment. While much has changed since its inception in 2000, our promise to focus on the unique needs of the educators who work every day to move learning forward has never wavered.

Want to find out more about all of the latest enhancements we’ve made to Study Island? Check out our What’s New in Study Island brochure!