How to Assign Skills for Students to Work On

My Math Academy (MMA) and My Reading Academy (MRA) are powered by adaptive learning technology and a patented, evidence-based Knowledge Map that provides each student with a personalized path to mastery through precise placement, guided instruction, immediate and actionable corrective feedback, and embedded assessment. Real-time analytics through our Dynamic Differentiation™ system determine the depth and degree of skill support and level of challenge that’s just right for each learner.

Our programs differentiate and optimize each student's learning experience in real time, so there's no need to assign anything within the programs.

However, we have a new feature in the Educator Center that allows Teachers to assign math and reading skills for students to work on in MMA and MRA. 

Teachers would like this feature turned on should ask a school Administrator. School Administrators should then reach out to their Customer Success Manager, who will be happy to turn this feature on for your account.

• Skills Assignment Overview
• How to Assign Skills
• How Assigned Skills Appear in the Program Hub
• How to Monitor Skills Progress

Skill Assignments Overview

Once this new feature has been activated within their organization, Teachers will be able to Assign Skills for students (all grades, pre-K to 5th) to work on in our programs. It’s a simple and effective way to mirror classroom curriculum in the students’ mastery program usage, or to target specific skills for individual students or groups based on Teacher-observed needs. 

Key Details:

• You can assign skills to an individual student, group of students, or all students to work on.
• Students must have completed their Placement Test before they're presented with any skills you assign.
• A maximum of 5 skills can be assigned at one time in each ”skill assignment” (groups of assigned skills), but you can create any number of skill assignments for the students to move on to.
• You can search for a specific skill or standard, or chose use the checkboxes to select from our default list of grade-level skills for your class.
• Within each program's activity hub (where students choose their activities), if there are teacher-assigned skills, students will see a special icon (a Teacher holding a pointer, shown in the following screenshot) on the activity tile on the right side of the screen.
  
  
  • Skill assignments will appear in the program hub the next time the student logs in.
    If the student is already using the program when the teacher assigns a skill, they’ll need to log out and back in for the new assignment to appear.
  • Students will be presented with the skill assignments, one at a time, in the order you created them, and within each skill assignment they will work on individual skills in the order that you selected them. 
  • If you have assigned multiple skills at once, your student will still only see one at a time in the hub, marked by the teacher with pointer icon. That icon will link to the second, third, etc. skills once the previous ones have been completed. 
  • Once students have completed all the assigned skills, they will only see their regular, adaptive activity recommendations (until new skills are assigned).
  • Students’ time working on assigned skills within the programs is tracked on the Usage Dashboard along with other regular activities.
  • Completing assigned skills does NOT move students forward within the regular, adaptive activities, and this progress on assigned work is NOT tracked on the Progress Dashboard.
  • Assigning Skills is not available for Administrators, just Teachers.
  • Assigning Skills is not currently available for My Reading Academy Español.

How to Assign Skills

1. Click on the program drop-down menu in the upper-left side of the Educator Center screen to choose which program you want to assign skills for (My Math Academy is the default).
   
   
    
2. Click Dashboards and select Assign Skills from the drop-down menu.
   
   
   
    
3. The default view for the Assign Skills feature is the Assign tab. Enter an Assignment Name just under the top tabs, and use the checkboxes to select students (there is an All Students option at the top) and skills (there is a Standards and Skills search box you can use just below the Assignment Name). 
   
   Tip: Double-check that you have the right students assigned to the right skills in the right order, because once you confirm the assignment you cannot cancel it or remove it from the student's hub. The student will need to complete the assignment.
   
   Once you have checked the assignments, click the Confirm button at the bottom of the page.
   
   
    

How Assigned Skills Appear in the Program Hub

• The student hub has a limited number of activity tiles—one of those tiles is reserved for teacher-assigned content.

• When a teacher assigns multiple skills (for example, 3 skills at once), the system immediately queues them in the order you assigned them.

• The first assigned skill appears on the hub in that dedicated assignment tile the next time the student logs in.

• As the student completes that activity and meets the mastery requirement, the system automatically updates that tile with the next assigned skill in the sequence.

• The other tiles continue to show the student’s regular personalized activities recommended by the program’s adaptive engine.

What this means for teachers

• Seeing only one tile for assigned skills is normal and intentional—it doesn’t mean the other assignments are missing.

• The student will work through each assigned skill one at a time, in the order they were given.

• When all assigned skills are completed, that tile will revert to standard adaptive content again.

How to Monitor Assigned Skills Progress

1. From the Assign Skills page, click on the Monitor tab. You will now see all your assignments, along with key details for each one. The Overall Progress tracker on the left displays the percentage of placed students who have completed all skills within this assignment. Also displayed for each skills assignment is the Date Assigned, Total Students, Total Skills Assigned, Students Not Started, Students In Progress, and Students Finished. 
   
   Note: These categories are self-explanatory, except, perhaps, that they apply only to students who have finished Placement. If you assign skills to other students who are still in Placement, they are not counted and will not be presented with your assigned skills until they have completed the Placement Test. On the following screen, if a skill is assigned to a student who hasn't finished Placement, it would say Total Students: 0 until the student finished Placement.
   
   
    
2. To see more details about the assignment, click the pop-up window icon to the left of the assignment name (see the arrow in the following screenshot)
   
   
   
    
3. Assignment details are repeated at the top of this page. Below that, you will see each skill and the standards that apply, with a bar graph showing the percentage of students who have completed each one. At the bottom, you will see all the students who were assigned these skills and their completion status.
   
   
   
    

Helpful Resources:

• Do you offer additional, in-classroom learning activities based on dashboard data?
• How do I find student usage?
• How do I find individual student progress data?
• How do I find the student and skills by standards?
• How do I view student progress towards readiness based on skills completed?
• How can I see groups of students who need support on the same skills and standards?