🆕 Enhancement releases
We've been busy! Here's a sneak peek at our latest new features and improvements:
Admin Pre/Post Report upgraded to a Growth Trends Report
The "Pre/Post Report" received a massive upgrade and has been officially renamed the Growth Trends Report.
Key updates include:
Compare up to 10 assessments: Admins are no longer limited to a single "before and after" pair. They can now line up as many as ten assessments to see growth across a whole series.
New Filter Sidebar: Assessment pickers have moved to a sidebar. Admins can search, select, and use drag handles to arrange assessments into chronological order (indicated by numbered positions 1-10).
Scope Selectors (New Views): We've added dedicated scope views! Admins can use the Scope selector to view "Standards Growth by School" (Site scope) or "Standards Growth by Teacher" (Peer scope).
Shareable Deep Links: Admins can now configure a report and simply copy/paste the URL to a colleague. The shared link automatically runs the report with the filters seamlessly collapsed.
Growth Trends for Teachers (School & District / BAF)
Teachers on School & District plans can now open a Growth Trends report from Reports, alongside Tracker and Progress — the same report admins already had, without the district/site/teacher selector, since a teacher only ever reports on their own students.
A Newsela app switcher in the left nav of Formative
A grid button at the top of the main navigation bar will open a list of Newsela's other solutions, so a user can move between products without going back out to a bookmark.
Practice sets now appear in a class's Activities tab
previously they were missing there entirely, even after being assigned. Now they are easily found on the activities tab of a class, and clearly marked with the practice set icon to differentiate from formatives.
Correct/Incorrect Display
Our design team started work to streamline the way correct/incorrect is marked on Gallery view of student responses (teacher side).
All question types are queued for this update, and the team will release to product as they go. This means that until the work is complete, some questions might display the new design while others still display the old one - however there is no functionality difference between the two views.
Header Layout (Design) Options
Every teacher can now pick a header image layout from the two options:
a full-width banner, or
a smaller inset image beside the title.
A newly uploaded header image will go in as the inset style by default, and teachers can switch to the full banner using the new layout control.
Rich Text (styling menu) updates
When the rich text editor is too narrow for its toolbar, the buttons that don't fit now go into a "more" dropdown instead of being cut off. Undo and Redo buttons stay visible.
Labeled dividers are now a standard option in the rich text editor's insert menu for every teacher: a dividing line with a short caption, for splitting content into named parts
Callouts are now a standard option in the rich text editor's insert menu for every teacher. A callout puts a box around a tip, warning or sample response so it stands out.
Change to left-side navigation bar
left-side navigation bar's sections with several pages within them now open their pages in the side rail with a Back link, replacing the horizontal tab row that used to populate at the top of the page (e.g. teacher reporting, admin sections)
School Year Update on Folder Clones
When copying a folder, teachers can apply a new school year to every formative inside it.
Standards Trends on Growth Trends Report
Growth Trends now charts how each standard moved from one assessment to the next - both on the Admin report and on the Teacher report. For admins: at site level there's a line per school, and at teacher level a line per teacher under each school
