Connor Scheer is a dedicated Professional Learning Specialist with nine years of experience in the classroom and in middle and high school leadership, with a focus in special education, behavior intervention, and curriculum development.

When it comes to progress monitoring, the right tools make all the difference. This is especially true in special education, where teachers often need to see how student growth lines up to both state standards and IEP goals.

As a former special education teacher, I’ve found that IXL Quizzes is a particularly flexible and efficient solution for progress monitoring. IXL Quizzes lets you create custom assessments by drawing questions from almost any skill in IXL’s curriculum, so you can tailor quizzes to assess specific skills, standards, and IEP goals. 

By building and assigning quizzes, you can quickly gather meaningful and actionable data while getting valuable insights into where students need more support. IXL Quizzes is a streamlined tool that helps you make more informed decisions and adjust instruction. 

Let’s dive in and explore how IXL Quizzes can help you make the most of your time while keeping your students on track with their goals! If you’d like an in-depth look at how IXL Quizzes work, you can find out more in this IXL Minis video (make sure you’re signed in to your account to access it).

Step 1: Find skills aligned to IEP goals

IXL offers a full K-12 math and ELA curriculum, as well as science and social studies for kindergarten through high school, so you have plenty of options when it comes to material. My favorite way to find skills aligned to IEP goals is by using IXL’s state standards skill plans. These plans will list your state’s standards and the skills that align to those standards all in one place!

Here’s a tip: Pin the skill plans you want to use by selecting the pin icon next to it. You’ll be able to draw questions from them more quickly when you create your quiz.

Step 2: Plan your quizzes

Before you start creating quizzes, think of how you want to use them to track goal progress. Are you going to create a quiz for each student with an IEP, or are you going to group students who have similar goals? Quizzes can include questions from multiple skills that cover different topics, so a single quiz can track several goals at once.

Once you have a plan, start building your quizzes. If you’re using standards skill plans, you simply choose the standard and skill, select the number of questions you need, select their difficulty level and IXL will generate the questions for you! You can also find skills by grade or skills you’ve suggested to your students.

Step 3: Create copies of quizzes

Consistency is key in progress monitoring, so it’s important to track students’ growth on the same set of standards. IXL Quizzes makes this easy with its copying feature. After you make a quiz, you can create copies of it and modify them by generating new questions. Each copy will assess the same standards, but with new questions for your students

To make a copy of any quiz, whether it’s a draft, active, or past quiz, click the 3 dots in the upper right corner and choose “Create a copy.”

Step 4: Assign quizzes and monitor progress

Assign the quizzes to your students. As they complete their quizzes, you can see their performance and plan feedback using IXL’s quiz reports. 

To get an overall sense of how students did on a quiz, you can use the Quiz Analysis report. Find it by going to your past quizzes in the Quizzes tab and selecting “View report”. It shows you students’ scores (including an average for all students) and a breakdown of performance on each question.

Dive into particular students’ quiz performance using the Student Quiz Results report. Select a student’s name on the Quiz Analysis report and you’ll get a detailed look of how they did on each question. Use this report to check for misconceptions and adjust your teaching strategies. For instance, if a student consistently struggles with a specific question type, you can provide extra practice or 1:1 intervention in that area.

Step 5: Use quiz data for IEP meetings and reporting

IXL Quiz data comes in handy when it comes to documenting and sharing student progress, as well as making informed decisions for IEP meetings.

You can export quiz results directly from the Quiz Analysis report into a PDF or Excel file, making them easy to share with parents, guardians, and other members of the IEP team. You can also use Student Quiz Results reports to track a particular student’s growth over time.

Step 6: Repeat and refine

As your students continue to progress, you’ll want to revisit their IEP goals and adjust quizzes accordingly. You can keep copying and refining quizzes over time to provide the most relevant, supportive practice for each student and create a streamlined progress monitoring system.

For more on how IXL supports special education teachers, see how you can use IXL to help you set IEP goals.