Item Banks

Item Banks

Item banks allow you to manage, share, and search for test items, passages, and rubrics. Everyone will have a Personal Bank. Additional item banks can be used to share items with specific people or institutions. For example, you may have a bank of restricted items for district assessments, a district bank with items meant for classroom tests, a bank for draft items that will eventually be shared in another bank, a bank for teachers at a particular school, or a bank for just for math teachers.

Item Banks replace Item Central and item co-authoring in Schoolnet 21.0 and later.

Access rights are defined for each user or institution in a bank: View Only, View and Edit, or Manage. Institutions have two defined roles: Everyone and Test Item Administrators.

To access Item Banks:

  1. Go to Assessments > Item Banks. All of the item banks you have access to will be listed. Everyone will have a Personal Bank.
  2. From here, you can view and manage your item banks and test items.

Each bank shows the number of items, passages, and rubrics contained in the bank, the bank owner, and your access rights to the bank. Click the Item, Passage, or Rubric box to search a bank.

Hover over the rights link (View, Manage, etc.) for a bank to quickly see who the bank is shared with.

ClosedTo create and share an item bank

You can add both people and institutions, with any combination of management rights, to a bank. The Create an item bank operation is required to create a bank and share it with individual users. The Share an item bank with users at an institution operation is required to share a bank with institutions. After you have created a bank, you will be able to view and change which institutions and individuals can access your bank.

  1. On the Item Banks page, click the Create a New Bank button.
  2. Enter the item bank name and description. The bank name can have up to 150 characters.
  3. Under Sharing Settings, click People to give individual users access to the item bank. In the pop-up window, you can:
    • Search for and select the people that will have access to the bank. You can search by name or user ID.
    • Select the management rights for each user: View Only, View and Edit, or Manage.
    • Click Add People to give the selected users access to the item bank.
  4. Under Sharing Settings, click Institutions to give users at selected institutions access to the item bank.
    • You will see your default institution and all its children, for example, "North School District, 3 Regions and 127 Schools." You can only share from your institution level and down.
    • Click the filter icon and down arrow to select specific institutions to share the bank with. Select Include all child institutions in search to share the bank with child institutions, for example, all the schools in a region or district.
    • Select the management rights for Everyone and Test Item Administrators: View Only, View and Edit, or Manage. Clear the checkbox for Everyone or Test Item Administrators to make the bank unavailable to them.
    • You can add multiple groups of institutions. Any combination of institutions and rights is allowed, and overlapping is allowed (the same institution in different groups). This allows you to create a bank that can be edited by Item Administrators at the district institution and viewed by Item Administrators at all schools.
    • Click Add Institutions to give the institutions access to the item bank.
  5. Click Create Bank. The bank will appear in the list of item banks for you and the people you shared it with.
  6. Select the Search this bank when building tests checkbox to include the item bank in searches when adding items to a test and when searching from Find in the left navigation. This checkbox applies to items, passages, and rubrics.

    Only banks with this checkbox is selected will be included in searches when building a test, and in the Assessments > Find search in the left navigation.

ClosedTo manage or delete an item bank

Only bank managers can edit or delete a bank. The Last Modified date for a bank indicates the last time bank properties or any item, passage, or rubric in the bank were modified.

  1. Do one of the following:
    • Bank managers: On the Item Banks page, click Manage for the bank you want to edit or delete.
    • System operators: Click System Admin Bank Search to search for and manage a particular bank. See System Admin Bank Search.
  2. To edit a bank: Modify the name, description, and sharing properties as needed, and then click Save.
  3. To change the bank owner: Click the Make Owner link for a user with manage rights to the bank. The previous owner will still have manage rights, but this can be changed. Note that any user with manage rights can change the owner. The bank owner cannot be removed from the bank until ownership is changed.

    The "Owner" label identifies who created or currently manages the bank. This label is cosmetic. The bank owner has standard manage rights.

  4. To delete a bank: Click Delete Bank. This button will not appear if the bank contains any items, passages, or rubrics; a bank must be empty before it can be deleted. Expired items will not appear in the item count but will be permanently deleted if you delete a bank containing them.
ClosedTo search for an item, passage, or rubric

For more detailed steps, see Item Bank Search or All Filters (Advanced Search).

  1. Do one of the following:
    • On the Item Banks page, locate the item bank you want to search, and then click Items, Passages, or Rubrics for that bank.
    • Go to Assessments > Find to quickly search for items or passages and linked items.
  2. Expand Filters at the top left, enter the search criteria, and then click the search icon. When searching on text for items and passages, select whether to include All Words or Any Words in the search. Word order and quotation marks are not considered.
  3. Click All Filters to perform an advanced search.
  4. In the actions dropdown for a particular item, select the appropriate option. The actions you can take depend on your rights to the item bank.
  5. Click Close to exit the search results.

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