CASAS Helper helps California adult school teachers meet their CASAS obligations in a way that imposes as little of a burden as possible on instructional time, eliminates student over-testing, and maximizes school benchmark gains.

With just 2 computers in your class connected to www.workingteacher.com and about an hour set-up time (for a full-sized class), the CASAS Helper program insures that you know when to give students a CASAS test and which test to give them.

Students themselves do most of the work by signing-in to class every day on the single, shared student computer.

	Any student needing a test will be highlighted on your Daily sign-in list, and clicking on a student's name will bring up their full record which will indicate the required test.

You can be certain that the testing is not being given too soon or being given a second or third time by mistake, and you can be assured that no students are slipping through and not being tested when they should. You never have to devote special days to "doing CASAS" or worry about over-testing your students.

To set-up CASAS Helper up for your particular schedule and preferences, you have to:

1) Enter the names and durations of the different classes you teach.

2) Enter the names of the different CASAS tests you use.

3) Indicate the amount of attendance time you want your students to accumulate before being alerted for a CASAS test.

4) Sign-in (one time) on the classroom student computer and indicate that it is a classroom computer. This prevents students from signing-in for attendance credit from home (inadvertently, of course).

5) Enter the names of your students for each of your classes (this is the big job).

6) Update your student records with the latest information (if available) from your school's CASAS Administrator --which would include the name of the next CASAS test for a student, the approximate time remaining until their next test (depending on how long ago they took their last CASAS test), and whether or not the student has reached their benchmark (by setting Status to "Benchmark OK").

The initial setup for a normal size class should take about an hour. And after that? Very little.

If and when you receive updated CASAS testing information from your school's CASAS Administrator, use that to update the individual records for the students it mentions. This would amount to changing what the next CASAS test should be ...

... or marking that a student has reached their benchmark and so no futher testing is required.

If a student is on a list and hasn't been to your class yet, it would be wise to add them to your roster at this time so that your CASAS records are kept up to date and you don't inadvertently give the student the wrong test later on. In the event a new student starts your class and a CASAS test has not been specified, you have to select whatever the default test is given the student's course.

When a new student comes into the class, add them onto the roster, select their initial CASAS test, ...

... and ask them to sign-in on the student computer (showing www.workingteacher.com) with the default (but changeable) username and password CASAS Helper has generated for them.

Once you get CASAS Helper set-up and the timers are all running down for CASAS tests, it's surprising how little testing you actually have to do. CASAS just retreats into an insignificant aspect of your work as a teacher. And it's not because you're hiding away from it, but because now you are doing it so efficiently.

In the initial set-up, you will have provided CASAS Helper with: 1) the duration of each of your classes (for example: 2.5 and 4 hours) and 2) the number of hours of attendance (80, for instance) that a student should accumulate before taking their CASAS post-test.

Both these values, incidently, can be adjusted individually for each student in the student's individual record, as special circumstances warrant.

With this information, CASAS Helper keeps a running total of each student's hours of attendance, reducing the student's remaining "hours to CASAS" by the amount of the class duration indicated for that student every day the student signs-in.

When a student's remaining time reaches zero, the student will be notified upon signing-in, and the student's name will be highlighted on your list of students in attendance for that day. And, unless you've disabled it in Preferences, a short "door knock" sound alert on your computer will notify you that something needs your attention.

♪ audio alert

When you give the student a CASAS test, be sure to click the "Give CASAS Now" button on the student's record. This will update the student's status and reset the hours remaining until the next test.

When the office notifies you that a student has scored high enough to reach the required benchmark, be sure to change the student's Status to "Benchmark OK." This will exempt you and the student from further CASAS alerts.

There is also an "Hours to CASAS" window that displays all your students in order of remaining hours from lowest to highest. This is kind of interesting to look at once in a while to see how close everyone is getting to a test, but, practically, being alerted through the daily "Today" view sign in sheet (or having students walk up to you and say, "The computer says I'm supposed to take a test?") is easier.

CASAS Helper was created by a teacher for himself and other teachers. The program's sole purpose is to help teachers do their teaching work better. It addresses the issue of CASAS for the simple reason that CASAS represents an intrusion into a teacher's classroom that can interfere with effective teaching. This program does not attempt to be an SIS (Student Information Service) or CASAS Administrative program. It remains within the domain of a teacher's workspace and attempts to render CASAS as unobtrusive as possible for the extent of its legally mandated stay in your classroom. Like Turbo-Tax (says it) does for taxpayers, our program helps teachers do an otherwise tedious aspect of their work more efficiently. Using CASAS Helper does not affect a teachers' interaction with their school administration, their CASAS documents, or their roster any more than TurboTax affects a person's interaction with the IRS. It's a personal tool that a teacher can use to make some of the administrative aspects of the work they do more efficient. An identical result could be achieved without CASAS Helper by simply spending more time on administrative work and less time on teaching.

The CASAS Helper program is part of a larger math instructional program that provides both interactive and non-interactive help for several independent study adult ed. math courses. The topmost page at www.workingteacher.com is the portal through which everyone (visitors and registered users alike) go through to access content on the site.

The reason it's there is that, for the non-interactive help that's available, it's not necessary for students to sign-in. For this reason, and to have the fewest possible hurdles a student has to work through to get the help they're looking for, as much as possible of the available help is shown on the first page that the student will see. For students who don't consider drilling-down through menus and links on a website to be an interesting challenge on the way to finding help, something as simple as this could make the difference between a service that gets used and one that does not.

As a CASAS Helper user, please try to ignore the help stuff on the sign-in page.

As an unintended but useful bonus, CASAS Helper leaves you with a computerized and editable record of daily student sign-ins that can be viewed (or exported to PDF, shown below right) and used for preparing your weekly roster.

If you elect to use CASAS Helper to help with your attendance, when it is time to submit your class roster, you can use it's record of student sign-ins to fill-out your roster in record time.

And, as noted, if you feel a bit wary about having this important information exist on a computer server somewhere in cyberspace instead of on paper, all attendance and student data can be exported as PDF documents that can be saved or printed using Adobe Acrobat and other free PDF readers.

Exporting and printing your Today's sign-in lists at the end of every day leaves you with the paper equivalent of traditional daily sign-in sheets --albiet alphabetized. At the end of the week you can use these to prepare your roster, or you can work directly from the Weekly Attendance window (on-screen or as an exported PDF) which is a compilation of all the preceeding days of the week. You can elect to display (or export) all the students in your class or just those in attendance that week.

Most teachers who need a way to keep track of their CASAS testing could also likely use a secure and efficient way to keep track of the materials they loan out to students. Materials is a sub-program included with CASAS Helper that is designed to meet this need.

Clicking on the Materials icon in the tool bar and then on the Inventory button will present you with a list of whatever materials you may have already entered into the inventory plus 10 additional spaces below that for entering new materials.

To add a new material to the inventory, enter the name of the material in one of the empty text boxes in the "Material Name" column on the left.

If you leave the copies section blank, Materials will assume there is an unlimited supply of the material and will not specify a particular copy number when you check-out the material to students who request it.

If you enter a list of available copies, Materials will assign a particular copy (one of those in your list) for each student requesting that material. Once all copies have been checked-out, that material will no longer be availbe for students to check-out, and students will see that. (The student's materials selector shows how many copies of each material have yet to be checked-out.)

If you would like to limit the number of copies of a material that can be checked out (say, 3 hall passes) but don't need to track them in terms of copy numbers, you could enter a made-up list of copy numbers (say, "1,2,3" or "a,b,c") and then just ignore whatever copy number Materials chooses when you check-out and return the item.

After you have made any changes to the inventory, click the "Save" button to record those changes.

Students initiate the check-out process by signing-in on the classroom student computer (possibly as part of signing-in for attendance), clicking "Check-Out Materials" link at the top of the screen, selecting the materials they want to check-out, and then clicking the "Check-Out Selected Materials" button.

You can enable or disable the audio alert by checking or unchecking the "Enable audio alerts" checkbox in the "Misc." section in "Preferences."

To see what's waiting to be checked-out (and what has already been checked-out), click the "Materials" tab on your computer to open the Materials Check-Out and Inventory screen, and then click the "Check-Out" radio button.

Materials that students have requested to check-out but have not yet received are shown under "Requested Materials."

To check out one or more materials, select the material by clicking on its representative bar (you un-select a material by clicking on it a second time) and then click the "Check-Out Selected Materials" button.

This will cause the items to move down to the bottom section under "Checked-Out Materials," and those materials are now considered to be checked-out to the student.

When a student returns one or more materials, select them and click the "Return Selected Materials" button. They're now returned to the pool of materials available for check-out.

To cancel a request for a material, select it and click the "Cancel Selected Materials" button at the top.

Clicking the "Undo Last Action" button will do just that. It applies to checking-out, returning, and cancelling.

You can keep notes about individual students and leave notes for individual students to see when they sign in. Students who have notes to them or about them are highlighted on the daily sign-in list and on their individual record page.

In an ideal adult school setting (which is how legislators probably imagine it), students start the school at the beginning on the year and attend regularly. In this scenario, the teacher or someone from the office would test students at the beginning of the school year and then again after a designated amount of instruction time had elapsed (the State of California recommends 70-100 hours). Comparing the results would show how much each student improved. Some students would do well enough to meet the minimum amount of improvement required by the state and some would not. Students not meeting the benchmark would be noted and would be re-tested after a designated duration of additional instructional time had elapsed. Simple.

In real life adult education, it can't work this way because because student attendance is irregular, and most adult school classes are open-entry/open-exit. Our courses are usually individualized instruction programs in a learning center or some other flexible admission arrangement. A 'course' is not a traditional K-12 or college-type course but an ongoing enterprise with no uniform 'beginning' or 'ending' in the conventional sense. This, incidently, in addition to one-on-one teacher-to-student attention and short-term vocational instruction, are important services adult schools provide that community colleges do not.

If students start school at different times during the school year and, often, attend irregularly, each student will have a different number of accumulated hours of instruction at any given time. Knowing when to give students the CASAS pre-test is easy. We give them the pre-test when they first start coming to class. But when do we give them the post-test? That's a difficult problem that adult schools have to deal with.

Since students don't all start school at the same time, the reasonable approach to knowing when to give them a post-test might seem to be to have someone from the office keep track of student attendance, time since enrollment and past test results and then periodically notify the teacher which students are due for a test. In practice, however, this does not work. It fails for one of the main reasons it was needed --that is, irregular adult student attendance.

Whatever testing "to-do" list the teacher has from the office, only some of the students on that list will be present on any given day. So, to implement testing of those on the list, the teacher will regularly have to go through the list, comparing students in attendance against those on the list and those to whom the teacher has already given tests. And the list can only be used for a few weeks because, as time goes on, other students will "come on line" as now needing a test and so a new list will need to be generated. The accounting work undertaken by a teacher during class time to keep track of all this amounts to at least 30 minutes a day for a normal size class, and can easily become the teacher's primary focus. An irony of this system is that a great deal of time and effort is siphoned off from what should be teaching time in order to achieve an accountable system the very purpose of which is to promote more effective teaching.

Given the open-entry/open-exit nature of most adult school courses, course structure in many courses is provided by having each student work through their own individualized instruction program. Pegging CASAS tests to pre-defined milestones on a student's individual program is a way to determine when to give students their CASAS post-test which doesn't rely on testing lists and takes into account the open-entry/open-exit and often irregular attendance of the adult school population.

One of the main drawbacks of this approach, however, is that students of different backgrounds will progress through their contracts at different rates. On the surface this wouldn't seem to pose a problem because if a student is progressing faster, then the student would seem to be learning faster. But, practically, this is not true. The student going fast is most likely not "learning fast" but rather displaying knowledge they already had or could quickly figure out. Or possibly they are just "assignment shrewd" and know what to do to get their assignments marked off. The student going slow isn't "learning slow" but is having trouble with the material, not making an effort or, possibly, "taking the whole thing too seriously" (the opposite of being assignment-shrewd). In both cases, the general skill improvement that students achieve separate from the program's more narrow subject matter will be determined more by the amount of time they are engaged and immersed in the subject rather than by how rapidly or slowly they proceed through the material. Put another way, someone who starts at a high level will progress quickly through a contract but they're largely the same person at the end as they were at the beginning, and a generalized pre and post test will reflect that. Someone who starts at a low level will progress slowly through a contract but will come out the other end a changed person --and a generalized pre and post test should reflect that too.

Determining post-test points in reference to milestones on students' individual programs is also practically difficult to implement. In most individualized instruction classrooms, the work that students submit for grading is rarely graded at the moment it is turned in. Most student work is batched with other student work and graded later as time permits. The teacher won't encounter a CASAS testing point on a student's program until the student's work has been graded and the results entered onto the student's program form. That's when the teacher will physically see it. But, since the grading was batched, that could be days later, and the student may or may not be in attendance. So, essentially, the teacher will have to keep a list of students (not in attendance at the time of grading) who need tests, and we're back to using testing lists. The difficulty with testing lists, as noted earlier, is that the teacher has to perform a great amount of clerical work in order accomodate irregular student attendance.

The end result of mapping CASAS testing to specific points on a students' instructional programs is that students who go fast will be over-tested and students who go slow will be under-tested. Or, more likely, to make sure we catch students who go slow, most of the students will end up being over-tested and the fastest students, like the best attending students (when we test on regular time intervals --eg, "CASAS days") will be over-tested the most. And, due to the delayed nature of most grading, not even this will free the teacher from the need for unwieldy testing lists.

The nature of learning being what it is, accumulated attendance time is the ideal way to determine when to give students their CASAS post-tests. But, since this is unworkable to apply to an adult school class as a whole because of irregular attendance and because of the open-entry / open-exit nature of adult courses, we have to apply it on an individual basis. To do this, each and every day we need to know: 1) who is in attendance on that day, 2) what is the accumulated hours of attendance for each of those students, and 3) what is the current CASAS test status of each of those students. This is similar to what is done with office-prepared testing lists except that it is generated locally within the classroom at the moment it is needed. With this information, whenever a student enters class, we can check the student's attendance up to that point, see what their CASAS test status is, and then decide (based on whatever time duration standards we've set) if a test is appropriate for that particular student at that particular time.

A teacher trying to do this on his or her own would need hours every day --at the cost of time take away from students-- in order to accomplish. A computer program such as CASAS Helper, on the other hand, can perform this kind of work with perfect accuracy in a fraction of a second. Most of the physical labor is done by the students themselves when they sign-in. The teacher has to get involved only when the program decides that a test is required, and then, only to dispense and collect the test. For 95%+ of student-sign-ins, a test will not be required.

Once you get CASAS Helper up and running and the timers are running down for everyone's CASAS test, it's surprising how little testing you actually have to do. The reason for this feeling is not that you're avoiding giving tests that you should be giving but that the methods you have used up to now have been so inefficient by comparision (with much over-testing) that it just seems like very little. Given the common availibility of internet-connected computers in adult adult school classrooms and the ease of implementing CASAS Helper, this is a no-brainer approach for knowing when to give students their CASAS post-test. It takes what is typically a disorganized, incomplete, disruptive, and contentious process, and makes it into something that is rational, calm, agreeable, and straightforward. No student gets over-tested, no student gets under-tested, and it all works out efficiently. Simple.