Acuity in Mesa Public Schools

Acuity was launched in Mesa Public Schools this fall, during the 2007-2008 school year. Educational Technology is excited to offer both training and support for the district's new learning-based assessment system and we look forward to the opportunity to help you and your students achieve success.

How Acuity was Chosen and How is it Being Implemented?

We started our process by talking to major user groups – principals, teacher specialists, test coordinators, superintendents and asked them [a] what they wanted in a system, [b] what they liked and didn’t like about the StandardMaster system and what they think would ideally happen if the system was in place. We also looked at other districts, examined what was in the market, and got a good feel for what was available.

Based on that feedback we developed an RFP that had a lot of wishes as well as wants and needs. The idea was it would guide the committee as they reviewed the proposals so they didn’t focus on one aspect of the proposal and it would make the vendors commit/and address specific features of their offerings.

We then created an adoption committee. By design it did not include district curriculum and assessment staff. These people were involved in reviewing and giving evaluations of proposals to the committee, but they were not the ‘deciderers.’ The committee consisted of teachers, principals, and a superintendent. In addition it was chaired by Suzie DePrez, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Joe O’Reilly, Executive Director of Student Achievement Support.

The vendors were narrowed down to three and these were required to open a test version of the software for the review committee and district specialists to ‘test drive.’ This was followed up with several requests for information from the vendors.

Finally, the vendors came in for a sixty minute session. They were given fifteen minutes to present anything they wanted and then the remaining time was taken up with committee questions. Time was not allowed for a product demonstration by the vendor.

The committee narrowed the choices to two and then laid out the pros and cons of each. Both finalists were considered acceptable but the almost unanimous first choice was Acuity. All teachers and principals preferred it, although one thought the competitor could be implemented faster because of a concern that Acuity would be delayed while the alignment to the state standards was completed. (This turned out to be an unfounded concern.)

View the District RFP for Acuity & TurnLeaf

"Acuity is an advanced learning-based assessment system that helps teachers focus on the strategies that most effectively impact student achievement.

Acuity's flexible suite of classroom-friendly, diagnostic and predictive assessments provides actionable data on student achievement to help educators target instruction, measure student progress toward state standards, and predict performance on the state NCLB test. Each assessment [will] be administered either online or via paper and pencil; with results available online immediately.

Acuity provides the perfect combination of valid and reliable content and flexibility. In addition to high-quality pre-built assessments, teachers or administrators can create customized tests with Acuity's state correlated online item bank.

Acuity Math and Reading/Language Arts include:

• Three Predictive Benchmarks per grade per subject
• Four Diagnostic Assessments per grade per subject
• Instructional Exercises for guided practice
• State-Correlated Item Bank for creating custom tests"