TO EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS EDITORS:

Yearly ProgressPro(TM) Enhancements Help Districts Meet Annual Yearly Progress Goals

NEW YORK, Feb. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Yearly ProgressPro(TM), the popular online progress monitoring tool, has added enhanced data collection, management and reporting modules to help districts manage student data and monitor growth toward Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals as required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Yearly ProgressPro now offers the District ProgressPro(TM) Data Suite, with enhanced reporting capabilities that identify mastery levels by district, school, classroom, grade level, and student. This service helps districts collect and analyze data by all demographic groupings required by NCLB, including: gender, ethnicity, income, disability status and English proficiency. Yearly ProgressPro provides data for teachers to forecast classroom needs, identify students for intervention and help students achieve higher success on all learning standards. With the addition of the District ProgressPro Data Suite, administrators will now be able to forecast and monitor progress towards district AYP goals.

"Yearly ProgressPro is a technology-based progress monitoring system that collects and organizes data vital to instructional decision-making," said Brad Onken, president of McGraw-Hill Digital Learning. "Yearly ProgressPro delivers student, classroom and district information that can be used by educators to effectively make instructional decisions that have a direct impact on student achievement."

McGraw-Hill Digital Learning has also introduced the Auto-Roster Exchange service, which allows districts to automate the creation of Yearly ProgressPro class rosters by extracting data from a district Student Information System. Auto-Roster Exchange saves hours of data entry time by preloading and maintaining all relevant student data for generating student, class, and district reports.

Yearly ProgressPro's new District ProgressPro Data Suite and Auto-Roster Exchange services offer:

* Access to mastery reports that identify levels of proficiency by student, classroom, school, grade level, and district;

* Ability to generate reports disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, poverty level, disability status, and English Proficiency to track progress towards NCLB requirements;

* Student Information System exchange Application Programming Interface (API) to load and keep current students, teachers, classrooms, roster assignments, demographic information such as the NCLB attributes, and grade levels, while maintaining strict adherence to FERPA privacy regulations; and

* Transfer students complete assessment history between schools within a district as students move between schools, providing teachers with up- to-the-minute access to information in districts with high student mobility rates.

About Yearly ProgressPro

Yearly ProgressPro is a classroom-based progress monitoring tool that measures student skill mastery through weekly, 15-minute tests. Yearly ProgressPro assesses the entire grade level curriculum to monitor both mastery and retention of learned skills for improved performance on end-of-year tests. Yearly ProgressPro also includes exercises and practice sets that provide a tutorial for a given skill and can be assigned automatically based on student performance on the weekly assessments. The data management function allows educators to track individual student strengths and weaknesses and track whole-class performance on specific skills or skill groupings.

Yearly ProgressPro was developed in collaboration with leading academic researchers, and built upon 25 years of research in Curriculum-Based Measurement that has been validated in more than 200 published studies. Yearly ProgressPro Math is available now for Grades 1-8, and Algebra, with Geometry due this summer. McGraw-Hill Digital Learning's Yearly ProgressPro Reading/Language Arts is currently under development.

For more information on Yearly ProgressPro, visit www.mhdigitallearning.com and click "product tour" or call 1-, ext. 4424.

About McGraw-Hill Digital Learning

McGraw-Hill Digital Learning provides research-based, standards-aligned solutions that integrate diagnostics, prescriptive content, and reporting to improve instruction and raise student performance. It is a unit of McGraw-Hill Education, a leading global provider of electronic and print products that enhance teaching and learning in the pre-K through 12th grade, higher education and professional markets. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), a global information services provider meeting worldwide needs in the financial services, education and business information markets through leading brands such as Standard & Poor's and BusinessWeek. Founded in 1888, the Corporation has more than 322 offices in 33 countries. Sales in 2003 were $4.8 billion. Additional information is available at http://www.mcgraw-hill.com .

SOURCE  McGraw-Hill Digital Learning