For Immediate Release
Contact: Chad Colby: Chad.Colby@greatminds.org
Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020—Great Minds® today announced a new digital assessment and practice tool for Eureka Math® and Wit & Wisdom®, its English language arts curriculum. The new in-house Affirm® enables Great Minds to seamlessly integrate the assessment questions with its instructional materials. This includes adding digital assessments to Wit & Wisdom for the first time.
“Teachers look for the best possible digital tools to gauge how well their students are learning in real time,” said Richesh Ruchir, chief technology officer. “Our new Affirm delivers exactly that. Developing Affirm within our company allows for close alignment to the implementation of our curricula. This ensures a complete product and a positive customer experience from start to finish.”
Affirm provides instant grading and reporting to help teachers track student progress over time. The tool also provides students with extra practice and preparation for state standardized tests, with questions mirroring the testing format.
Affirm for Eureka Math has more than 450 assessments for Grade 1 through Precalculus, all fully aligned with the Eureka Math assessments in the curriculum’s print edition. These assessments are unique to Affirm and are not available in print or through EngageNY Math.
Wit & Wisdom Affirm is the first one-on-one digital assessment tool using Wit & Wisdom content. With Affirm, teachers gain insights on student comprehension and the application of knowledge from the Wit & Wisdom texts and lessons, rather than focus on selected, isolated skills mastery.
With Wit & Wisdom Affirm, Grade 2 through Grade 8 teachers can implement more than 250 multiple-choice assessments. Affirm’s instant results and student and class performance data can be used to make lesson implementation decisions. Paired with class discussion, Affirm helps students build their understanding of complex texts.
The national conversation about the importance of knowledge-building curriculum is gaining momentum. Wit & Wisdom is one of the few high-quality options that can support educators who want to make the paradigm shift from a skills-only focus to knowledge-building in the way they teach English language arts. Eureka Math is a comprehensive Prekindergarten through Grade 12 curriculum teaching math as a body of knowledge rather than a set of skills.
More information about the new Affirm is available at greatminds.org/digital-assessments.
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About Great Minds: Great Minds provides the highest quality curricula to schools and districts nationwide, inspiring joy in teaching and learning. Great Minds is the only curriculum creator to have earned three Tier 1 ratings, the highest possible, from the Louisiana Department of Education, highly respected for its curricular leadership. Curricula earning the Tier 1 ratings were Wit & Wisdom, Eureka Math, and PhD Science. A 2016 RAND Corporation report found Eureka Math and its original version, EngageNY Math, to be the most widely used elementary school math curricula in the nation. Geodes, a library of beautifully illustrated, content-rich books with phonics practice for emerging readers, is the latest Great Minds offering to delight teachers and students. Learn more at greatminds.org.
