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.

Analyze Assessment Series Performance with New Metrics

Use the Assessment Series reports to quickly understand proficiency levels and participation rates across your district or schools. The Percent Proficient metric shows you the percentage of students who are meeting or exceeding grade-level expectations, with district and national benchmarks included for context. This allows you to see at a glance how your students are performing compared to broader standards without needing to do manual calculations.

Monitor the Submission Rate (Submitted/Assigned) in real time to confirm whether your data is complete before analyzing results. This is especially valuable during active testing windows, as it helps you identify participation gaps quickly and ensure all assigned students complete their assessments. These new metrics are now included in all Assessment Series reports, making it easier to share complete performance data with stakeholders.

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.

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. 

Analyze Individual Student Results

Click on a student's name in a given class or use the Student filter to review an individual student's data. This will provide a detailed report of the student's performance throughout the year on both assignments and assessments, and how their results correspond to specific standards. As you review the data, make note of which teacher(s) are using CommonLit with this student this year, what types of lesson the student is being assigned, and if they've struggled on specific lessons or standards. Detailed instructions on how to locate this data can be found here.

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