Callout: This blog post is part of the Mastery Connect Feature Spotlight series, where we highlight enhancements and updates designed to make your experience simpler and more powerful.
In every classroom, teaching and assessment go hand in hand. Educators know that frequent, formative checks for understanding are essential for guiding instruction and intervening early. But there’s one big hurdle that always seems to get in the way: time.
From our conversations with district partners, we know that creating high-quality, standards-aligned assessment items is one of the most important and most challenging tasks educators face. Writing new items takes time and requires deep familiarity with standards to ensure each question truly measures students’ understanding and aligns to the curriculum. When time is tight, assessments can get delayed or filled with less relevant content, which leads to gaps in the data educators rely on to drive student growth.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new, intelligent workflow to solve this exact problem: IgniteAI Item Authoring for Assessments.
Powered by IgniteAI, this feature provides a streamlined way for educators to generate high-quality, standards-aligned multiple choice questions directly from their instructional materials. By automating the drafting process, we are empowering teachers to reclaim their time and focus on what matters most: analyzing results and supporting students.
With this new feature, teachers and district authors can now instantly generate draft assessment items based on the texts, documents, and lessons they are already using in the classroom. This ensures that your assessments are not only fast to create but are tightly aligned with the content your students have actually learned.
How It Works
Item Authoring is simple, intuitive, and integrated directly into your existing item creation workflow. Here’s how it works:
- Create or Edit an Assessment: From the assessment builder in Mastery Connect, look for the option to add a new item.
- Select "Generate with AI": Click the Plus (+) or Add Item buttons and select Generate with AI from the dropdown menu.
- Provide Source Material: You can paste text directly from your lesson plan or upload a file (such as a PDF or Word document) containing the instructional content you want to assess. We strongly recommend that you upload a file so that your items are as accurate as possible. Also make sure to only upload files in the accepted formats (.pdf, .doc, and .docx) and only those under the file size maximum of 3 MB.
- Customize Your Context:
- Topic & Standard: Enter a topic focus and select the specific Standard you wish to measure.
- Rigor: Choose your desired Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and Bloom's Taxonomy levels to ensure the questions challenge students appropriately.
- Quantity: Specify the number of questions you need generated, as well as the point value of each item.
- Generate and Review: Click Generate Items. IgniteAI will analyze your text and produce a set of draft multiple-choice questions.
- Refine, Remove, and Add: Review the generated questions. You have full control to edit the question text, distractors, or correct answers or remove any items you don’t feel are relevant. Once satisfied and you’ve saved what you’ve wanted to keep, click Add to Material.
It’s that easy! The items are now part of your assessment, ready to be delivered to students or saved to your Item Bank for future use.
Keeping You in Control
IgniteAI Item Authoring for Assessments is designed as a partner, not a replacement: you remain the instructional expert. The tool provides the draft, but you always have the ability to refine IgniteAI-generated items or decide to remove items that you don’t feel are needed or relevant, ensuring that every item maintains the high standards your district expects.
With this update, Mastery Connect continues to enhance as a trusted tool to actively support the instructional cycle. By ensuring that assessment creation is fast, accurate, and aligned with your curriculum, you can maintain data integrity, empower your teachers with the right resources, and continue to support every student's learning journey without interruption.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in having Item Authoring enabled for your district, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
