AcademicMerit

At AcademicMerit, we have made the deliberate decision to focus solely on the College and Career Readiness (CCR) Anchor Standards in Reading, Writing, and Language for grades 6-12. The result of our efforts is a suite of award-winning, user-friendly online tools that helps schools seize this opportunity by not just generating the classroom-based assessment data they need, but also providing the academic content necessary to turn that data into differentiated instruction.

This suite of three award-winning programs achieves an educational impact greater than the sum of its parts—equipping teachers with the professional learning, assessment data, and differentiated content they need to support their students' development tied to the new standards:

FineTune

Online Professional Development in the Evaluation of Student Writing

• Teachers access a database of hundreds of actual student essays.
• Teachers evaluate each essay based on a five-category rubric aligned with the Common Core State Standards.
• Teachers receive immediate, category-by-category comparative scoring and analysis for each essay they score.
• Teachers take built-in assessments to measure performance and qualify for scoring of writing in Assessments21.
• Supervisors use the resulting data to provide targeted professional support.

Assessments21

Online Classroom-Based Common Assessments

• Teachers choose texts from among three genres (short stories, poetry, non-fiction) and four levels of difficulty for a classroom-, school-, district-, or state-level assessment.
• Students take the assessment, which measures their level of performance in reading comprehension and written analysis.
• The reading-comprehension assessment is scored automatically.
• Students' essays receive double-blind scoring by FineTune-approved Readers and Senior Readers.
• Questions and resulting data are correlated to the CCSS and easily accessed by student, teacher, and administrator.

Literary Companion

Online Text-Dependent Close Reading

• To complement students' reading of a literary text, teachers choose the corresponding Literary Companion title from among a library featuring dozens of the most popular books in grades 6-12.
• In an interactive online format, students undertake in-depth study of ten passages from the text.
• Formative assessments in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and written analysis complement rich, text-dependent content—all aligned with the CCSS.
• Teachers use the resulting data to inform instruction throughout the unit.
• Built-in final assessments in all skill areas provide a full set of data for students, teachers, and administrators.