| By Gale Staff |
With Gale In Context: For Educators, teachers have access to instructional content that makes it easier to achieve curriculum goals, engage students, and differentiate learning. Earlier this year, Gale added prebuilt assessments to help teachers monitor student comprehension and identify learning gaps. These assessments give teachers crucial data to analyze student understanding and make evidence-based decisions to keep students on track.
In time for the new school year, Gale In Context: For Educators is getting another upgrade to help teachers more efficiently evaluate comprehension and improve learning outcomes.
What’s New?
1. Create Your Own Assessments
Teachers already have access to over 1,000 premade assessments in Gale In Context: For Educators, but now they can also create their own. This flexible tool gives teachers greater control to plan lessons and evaluate comprehension in ways that fit their learning objectives and student needs.
With this update, teachers can add their own assessments to any content. They can narrow in on key concepts that matter to their lessons on English language arts, social studies, science, financial and digital literacy, and more—then identify areas that need further explanation and find ways to drive student success.
2. Ask Students More-Complex Questions and Give Feedback
In addition to multiple-choice questions, teachers can now ask students questions requiring short- and long-answer text responses. A student who has to explain a concept, such as in a short answer, is using a higher-level skill than just remembering or recognizing something, like with multiple choice. Long-answer questions take this a step further, requiring skills like analyzing and evaluating as well as constructing complete paragraphs and using claims and evidence. Teachers also have the opportunity to provide students with feedback on their answers, allowing for transparency and student improvement.
Why Use Digital Assessments?
Assessments in a resource like Gale In Context: For Educators allow teachers to easily engage students and monitor comprehension using their current digital workflows. Aside from giving teachers a more efficient way to evaluate student understanding, digital assessments also help students practice online test-taking.
By 2024, standardized tests like the SAT and many state assessments will be conducted primarily online.1 By building their own assessments, teachers can craft digital questions to prepare their students for this shift to online testing. Giving students more opportunities to practice testing in a digital environment will help them feel more comfortable for future standardized assessments.
What’s Next for Your School?
Updates for assessments are now live in Gale In Context: For Educators for all existing users. No action is needed on your part to access these new features. Get the word out to your teachers today so they can start customizing assessments to fit the needs of their students.
“Need more information or training? Visit the Gale support site or check out the tip sheet.
Not a subscriber of Gale In Context: For Educators? Get more details about this robust instructional tool, or contact your education consultant for an inside look.
What else is new in For Educators?
Gale In Context: For Educators now includes curated course subjects in high school financial literacy, high school digital literacy, and high school world literature. These features provide a quick and convenient path for teachers to find lesson plans and assignable instructional content to support these subjects from across the In Context suite.
Join Us!
Learn more about the tools, content, and workflows available for teachers in Gale In Context: For Educators at our webinar on October 19 at 2:00 PM ET.
Register now
1. Torchia, Rebecca. “SAT Will Go Digital for K–12 Test-Takers,” EdTech Magazine, February 23, 2022.