Aligning Standards and Setting Up Properties for Your Items

You can use the Item Properties menu in the item toolbar to align your items to standards and to enter other helpful details, such as the subject and grade levels an item belongs to.

Standards identify the specific skills or areas of knowledge that an item measures. Aligned standards will appear in the reports for Authoring tests, helping you pinpoint the specific areas in which a student may be excelling or may need additional support. The properties you set up for items also make it easier to filter items when adding them to tests or locating them on the Items tab.

All item properties are optional and can be entered at any point while an item has a Draft status. However, once an item is added to a test and the test is published, the item status changes to Published and its properties will be locked, along with its content.

You can use the Item Properties menu to set up the following properties for your items:

• Item Name: In the Item Name field, enter a unique name for the item.
• Subject: From the Subject dropdown, select the subject to which the item belongs.
• Grade: In the Grades section, mark the checkbox for each grade level the item should be associated with.
• Primary Standard: In the Primary Standard section, do one of the following:
  • If you already know the key for the standard, enter it in the search field and select the standard from the dropdown that appears.
  • If you don’t know a standard’s key, click Align to Standard and choose a standards publication from the dropdown. Additional dropdowns appear as you select from the available standard categories. Continue selecting options until you select a specific standard.
• Secondary Standard: After aligning an item to a primary standard, you can align the item to additional standards in the Secondary Standard field by following the same process used to align the primary standard.
• Description: In the Description field, enter a user-friendly description for the item.
• Difficulty Level: From the Difficulty Level dropdown, select whether the item is intended to be easy, moderate, or difficult.
• Keywords: Keywords allow you to search for items on the Items tab. To add a new keyword, enter it in the Keywords field and click Add. To remove a keyword, click beside that keyword.
• Source: You can use the Source field to explain the origin of any reading passage or other media you add to an item. For example, if a reading passage came from the public domain, you can mention that here.