Teachers and Administrators can edit a student's placement grade, or overall placement, by accessing the Student Placement page. Together, a student's placement grade and rostered grade determine the contents of their learning path, so changing a student's placement grade may adjust their upcoming lessons.
A key feature available when changing a student's placement is the ability to Lock Placement. Locking a placement prevents future assessments from automatically changing the student's assigned grade level. This is useful if you want to maintain a specific placement regardless of new assessment results.
Here are some situations when you may want to manually adjust a student's placement grade:
- Assessment results did not accurately reflect a student's abilities. This might be the case if a student experiences test anxiety or if the assessment did not fully capture their skills.
- A student completed their current learning path or is not being adequately challenged, so you want to change their placement to a higher grade.
- A student is consistently struggling to pass lessons. Note that MyPath will automatically adjust a student's learning path if they do not pass multiple lessons within a particular domain, but manually lowering the student's placement (and potentially locking it) may provide a better student experience.
- You want to override automatic placement to provide a consistent learning experience for a student.
Once the student's placement has been updated, MyPath will automatically assign lessons based on the new placement grade. Previous learning path data is still retained, and new lessons that have been assigned will be listed under the Upcoming view of the Student Progress report.
Caution
Please consider the following before manually changing a student's placement grade:
- If you manually change a placement grade after a student completes the MyPath Assessment, the manual placement will override the domain-specific placements, resulting in a standard grade-level learning path. The program will still adjust the student's learning path based on student performance, but domain specificity from the MyPath Assessment will be lost. Reassigning the MyPath Assessment may be preferable in some cases.
- With an NWEA or Renaissance integration, manual placement changes will override assessment-generated placements. However, future benchmark assessments may override manual placements if they result in a different assessed grade unless you lock the placement. Rather than manually changing placements, supplementing the student's learning path with lessons from the Assignment Builder may be preferable if the student's current placement seems inaccurate.
To change the placement grade of a student:
- Select a class.
- Click Student Placement in the upper navigation.
- Click more options (
) for a particular student, then click Edit Placement.
Tip
Use the student search bar to find a specific student.
- A popup appears that displays the subject, the student's current placement, the source and date of the student's most recent placement, a New Overall Placement drop-down list, and a Lock Placement checkbox (for Reading and Math only).
- Select a new placement grade from the New Overall Placement drop-down list or proceed to step 6 if you simply want to lock the student's current placement.
- For MyPath Reading and Math, you have the option to check the box next to Lock Placement to retain the current placement grade regardless of future assessment results.
- Click Update to save the changes.
Note
- When the student's placement grade changes, the new placement grade, the teacher or source of the change, and the date of the update will display on their Student Progress report
- Even with a locked placement, MyPath will continue to adapt the student's learning path based on their performance on mastery checks within each lesson. This ensures ongoing personalization and remediation as needed.
- To unlock a placement, simply return to the Edit Placement screen and uncheck the Lock Placement box.