Essential Skills

Providing over 50 hours of targeted practice, Essential Skills offers a comprehensive review of vital skills across multiple grade levels and supports effective differentiated instruction and review, helping eliminate the need for multiple remedial classes. The program contains core skills review, lessons, and exercises that enable students to review material they may have forgotten, learn new material they may not yet have learned, and master the skills required to answer more difficult multiple-choice items on standardized tests. The course addresses four groups of skills — English and Writing, Reading, Math, and Science — and each group is addressed at three levels: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.

Each skill is introduced with a brief lesson and examples, then tested through an exercise. Students can read the lesson and examples and then test their understanding with the exercise. They can work through the course either by starting at the beginning of a specific group of skills (or a specific level) and working through it to the end, or by focusing on the specific skills they most need to review, as guided by their teachers.

The Essential Skills teacher’s guide allows teachers to spend more time and practice on basic skills review and practice exercises. Built on three score ranges (high–medium–low) of the College Readiness Standards™, teachers can easily differentiate instruction based on student needs as they provide the practice needed to fill skill gaps, master tested skills, and increase scores.

Cambridge’s Essential Skills Lab is a comprehensive online course that provides up to 60 hours of rigorous curricula in an interactive, self-guided format. The course is available on all devices — computers, tablets, and smartphones — so students have access wherever the internet is available. The Essential Skills Lab contains lessons and exercises at three levels designed to help students master the content they will need for college entrance exams and in their first-year college classes. Student progress is tracked and all exercises are graded. Although no teacher involvement is necessary, teachers can track student progress, time on task, individual results, and scoring.

Based on three different score ranges for differentiated instruction and review, Essential Skills bell ringers are generally organized by category, moving within each category from easier skills to more difficult ones. The bell ringers are provided in 60 slideshow files, and each daily bell ringer includes 2 to 5 problems for students to work through on their own. The problems are then repeated on a second slide with a solution to use in discussing the item with the class.

Depending on how many days you plan to use the bell ringers, you can implement them in a couple of ways:

• Option 1 — 12 Weeks of Bell Ringers: Teach through the bell ringers for 60 days, using one file each day. Each file includes 2 to 5 problems plus the explanations for those problems.
• Option 2 — Selective Bell Ringer Coverage: Select bell ringers based on specific skills or a specific level of difficulty. For example, if you use them only on Fridays for a semester, you will need 12–14 bell ringers.

Cambridge’s Academic Skills Recovery Assessment provides the option for an abbreviated test — about 20 minutes for ELA and 25 minutes for math, less than half the time of an ACT or SAT test — to determine skill gaps for targeted instruction. The test includes a comprehensive group of data reports (premium or digital-now reports) that provide critical feedback regarding your students’ results.