An Intro to Mastery Connect, Instructure's AMS

What Is MasteryConnect?

Mastery Connect is an assessment management system and curriculum platform designed to show learning in an intuitive, visual way. It's built on four cornerstones: formative assessment, benchmark assessment, curriculum planning, and teacher collaboration. With Mastery Connect, K–12 educators can move the needle on student mastery by improving their assessment-instruction feedback loops, streamlining and scaling their curriculum planning, and more easily sharing resources.

How Is MasteryConnect Related to Canvas?

Mastery Connect and Canvas are learning platforms offered by Instructure. MasteryConnect is best used to inform instruction, while Canvas is used to deliver instruction. Together, the platforms provide a more personalized learning cycle, allowing teachers to frequently identify student levels of understanding specific to a set of standards, then immediately adapt instruction to meet individual student needs. 

To provide a seamless learning experience for both teachers and students, Mastery Connect continues to deepen its integration with Canvas. MasteryConnect is now accessible from the Canvas global left navigation, which means teachers and students can launch their assessment experience from within the Canvas LMS. They can also automatically export assessment scores to the Canvas Gradebook to better track and measure student outcomes.

How Does MasteryConnect Support Teaching & Learning?

Let's start with individual formative assessment, the practice of turning student data into instruction-improving insights.

With the Mastery Tracker tool, teachers can input raw scores from performance-based assessments such as projects and oral presentations, quickly scan multiple-choice bubble sheets via web or document cam, or upload their own rubrics against which to assess performance. Scores appear in real-time in the Mastery Tracker, and once the data's in, teachers can easily identify—via a delightfully digestible dashboard—which students (and which core standards) need more attention. This saves teachers time spent wrangling and analyzing data so they can focus on addressing students' personal learning needs.

Next up: interim benchmark assessments, where teachers take the pulse of students' academic strengths and weaknesses at the aggregate level to inform local leadership and policymakers.

Teachers can administer common benchmark assessments online through Mastery Connect. They can incorporate standards-aligned item banks, including technology-enhanced items (TEIs), from Mastery Connect or third parties; they can set proficiency targets and measure growth; and they can easily create reports for classroom-, county-, district-, or state-level use. And, of course, teachers can use these interim benchmark assessments in the formative process as well, to help students prepare for Common Core summative assessments and to progress toward personal mastery.

When it comes to curriculum planning, educators can use Curriculum Maps to add lesson plans, activities, content, and other resources aligned to any set of standards.

Curriculum Maps allow teachers and leaders to map standards along with scope and sequence across the district using a common set of guaranteed, reliable curriculum and assessment resources. It's a cumulative tool—teachers build on Curriculum Maps year after year, informed by formative assessments and teacher collaboration, to enrich their curricula and save time for actual instruction.

Teachers can also upload or pin standards-aligned resources to playlists and share them with students and teachers in a targeted and personalized way.

And, of course, common assessments, common assessment data, Curriculum Maps, and resource boards are shareable, which fuels teacher collaboration.

Mastery Connect also offers online discussion tools for professional learning communities, as well as easy discoverability of the most popular and most peer-reviewed assessments. Teachers can download and modify open educational resource (OER) assessments, and they can adjust the level of access to their own personally created assessments using privacy controls. 

How Does MasteryConnect Support Leaders and Administrators?

• K–12 leaders can connect Mastery Connect data to school and district dashboards or data warehouse systems through the simple REST API. 
• Student information system (SIS) integration is included, and applies to most major systems. 
• MasteryConnect's authentication tools allow single-sign-on from any tools or systems you've adopted or developed.
• Powerful reporting synchronizes roster information, demographics, and other key data points and allows for cross-standard data comparisons and simple communication with parents around standards and student progress.

To learn more about how Mastery Connect can help you streamline data analysis, inform instructional decisions, and personalize student learning, explore How to Choose an Assessment Management System.