This content was written prior to the renaming of Watermark products in July 2021, and refers to an old product name. To learn more about the new names for Watermark products, read our press release here.
NEW YORK, NY — October 7, 2020 –Watermark, a pioneer in educational intelligence, launched its newest innovation this week — an integrated Placement Management system for teacher education programs in its award-winning outcomes assessment and ePortfolio solution, Via by Watermark. With Placement Management, administrators can easily survey student preferences, connect to a national database of sites, and monitor the entire process with dashboards — simplifying an often manual, paper-based process, reducing the time it takes to manage this process, and better aligning candidates to teaching sites.
Findings from Watermark’s recent COVID-19 survey of institutional leadership indicated that assessment, including that of field experience and student teaching, continues to be mission critical as leaders look to leverage student learning artifacts and existing technologies to evolve outcomes assessment processes across campus and more effectively inform ongoing improvement efforts. In particular, educator preparation programs continue to struggle with disconnected data and technology systems, making it challenging to collect and use their data, demonstrate the meaningful improvement of student and program outcomes, as well as provide a full picture of candidate readiness and program effectiveness — all key requirements for accreditation.
With Placement Management in Via, programs can centralize their processes both for placing student teachers and for assessing candidate performance both inside and outside the classroom — eliminating the need to manage these processes in disparate systems. Placement Coordinators can set up a comprehensive network of partner sites and districts easily by connecting to a global site database from the National Center for Education Statistics. They can quickly gather student preferences — reducing the back and forth communication usually required to prioritize a student’s needs — and match them to optimal sites, ensuring a higher likelihood of success for their candidates.
In January, the company released a direct data integration between Via by Watermark and the company’s next-generation assessment planning and accreditation solution — Watermark Planning & Self-Study — so that institutions and programs can more easily leverage student learning outcomes data to inform their improvement efforts. Coupled with Watermark Planning & Self-Study’s recently released standards-aligned self-study reporting templates, programs can now use Watermark to manage and centralize all key processes from assessment planning and accreditation reporting, to program review, candidate placement, and performance assessment both inside and outside the classroom.
“We want to support teacher prep programs in fostering a meaningful culture of assessment and increasing engagement in improvement efforts. This work is important, and now with integrated Placement Management, programs can use Via by Watermark to streamline and centralize key processes to better monitor, analyze, and document student and programmatic improvements over time and present a more holistic picture of learning,” said Matt Bartel, Watermark’s Chief Product Officer.
In addition to Watermark Navigator, a centralized access point for users of multiple Watermark solutions and the recent Via by Watermark integrations, this release reinforces the company’s commitment to streamlining and centralizing core processes, connecting previously siloed data, and reducing administrative burden so programs and institutions can focus on making data-informed improvements to outcomes across all levels.
Contact:
Victoria Guzzo
Senior Director of Corporate Communications
vguzzo@watermarkinsights.com
