Quick Start Guide for Admins

Welcome to the CommonLit School Essentials PRO Administrator Data Dashboard! This article lays out some quick tips for how to start uncovering key insights about teacher and student usage within CommonLit.

Track Usage Over Time

View the Assignments Due by Week chart at the district or school level to get a sense for how many assignments are being created, on average, per week. Do spikes at particular times correspond to expected curriculum plans?

Are assignments being created with Guided Reading Mode the majority of the time? Has there been a change in the trend of the percentage of weekly assignments created with Guided Reading Mode? If you do notice a recent uptick or downtrend in assignments with Guided Reading Mode, use the date range filter to determine whether this change in assigning with Guided Reading Mode affected overall scores for that date range.

Compare Assignments by Genre

Compare the literary average and informational average for your school or district during your determined date range. Scroll down to the Most Assigned Texts tables and see if one genre - literary or informational - is being assigned to more students than the other. Here, you can draw connections between whether a high or low average can be attributed to more or less exposure to that genre.

Within a genre, determine if students are being assigned passages that are appropriate for their grade level, or across a wide range of grades and Lexiles. When you drill down to the teacher level, you can more accurately determine whether specific teachers are assigning texts at the appropriate levels.

At the teacher, class, and student level, you can determine whether more exposure to one genre leads to increases in literary or informational standard averages.

Review Your Most Active Teachers

Use the Educators table at the school or district level to discover which teachers are creating the most assignments. Which of your top assigning teachers have the highest and lowest average scores. You can filter by these teachers to learn more about their assignments, scores, and standards-level data.

Review Your Most Active Assignments

Click on an assignment name in any table or use the Assignment Name filter to go to the Administrator's Assignment Dashboard for a particular lesson. There, you can compare how all students are doing on a particular assignment. Investigate if students are completing core work on track using assignment status charts, compare how schools or classes are performing on standards data using standards charts, and compare students' overall scores to district averages in the at-a-glance section or to one another on the assignment in downloadable school reports.

Administrators can use the Assignment Dashboard to analyze assignments that are assigned across a whole grade as part of the core curriculum. 

Want school and district-wide data for your team? Learn more about School Essentials PRO here.