Purpose
The main aim of this paper is to propose the implementation of an upgraded assessment system in our district schools to ensure that students graduating from these schools are well equipped for college as well as the job market. Through this assessment method, students will develop skills and confidence required to meet the future challenges as they prepare to confront the world and be useful members to the economy of our society.
Introduction
The method proposed in this report to be used towards the realization of college and career-readiness for graduating students embraces an assessment system designed to improve accountability both for students and the administration as a whole. Current research studies continuously show that for students to be competent in the current job market, they should have attended a higher education level.
This means that students in high schools will need to be prepared for higher education, which will enable them to hold careers in future. District schools need to know, through assessments, that their graduating students will be qualified in these areas. According to this proposal, end-of-year tests will be added to students in 9th to 8th grades who will be arranged into groups.
Assessments will be conducted for English, Math and Science subjects at the end of each grade and results analyzed according to set performance standards. The set standards will take into consideration the requirements of PARCC as agreed by the member states.
Objectives
The main objectives of the assessment will be to enable teachers to measure student’s readiness to join the various colleges as well as the job market. It is intended to build a solid beginning for student’s future academic and career enablement. Schools are accountable for ensuring that student’s performance is improved by providing adequate learning opportunities.
The system is intended to reach out to all district school regardless of geographical location or the economic status of the attendant students by creating a uniformed method of assessment, universal to all the district schools.
The system is aimed at providing a regular pattern on the academic growth of students for both the teachers and students. It will help the teachers as well as the students to know the current status of their academic development and any corrective measures required to measure up to international standards of performance.
The assessments will enable them to review career and training opportunities available to them and formulate future plans both after high school and life after graduation.
It is also geared towards producing a highly competent staff in schools. It should produce data for “determinations of Principle and teacher professional development and support needs as well as teaching, learning, and program improvement,” (Department of Education, 2010, P. 18171).
This is because the teachers and the various assessors will be able to measure their own competencies and be able to review their instructional practices to bridge the gap between the achieved results and the desired or set objectives. This will result to more competent staff in schools, which will yield improved school performance.
Scope and context
The project is designed to add an End-of-Grade project for each student in 9th to 12th grades. This will apply to English, Math and Science subjects. For English, the tests will be aimed at increasing students’ proficiency and literacy levels in language.
To increase effectiveness, the school shall undertake “ such instructional features as challenging and engaging instruction, authentic learning tasks, increased focus on literacy, and emphasis on the language demands of content-based learning,” (Lachat 2004).
However, “effective programs also include strategies specific to English learners, such as intentional instruction in academic English, second language reinforcement through content area instruction, and native language support,” (The Education Trust 2008, P. 8).
Schools will develop a proficiency exam score of teacher marks combined with score achievement in English, math and science that will help decide on eighth-grade promotion and graduation from high school, thus incorporating new student performance requirements.
These developments will give “both educators and students [to] have a stake in common measures, therefore providing the symmetry needed for students and teachers to work toward common academic goals,” (Porter, et al 2002, P. 31).
Through the End-of-Grade assessment test, students will develop skills to think critically and improve in their problem solving methods. It will also ensure that teachers assist the students to achieve the ultimate goal which is good final results at the end of high school academic syllabus.
Assessment program
Students will be arranged in groups of four, three and two for grades 9, 10 and 11 respectively while 12th grade students will be required to submit an individual project but at the same time will be arranged into mentor groups of three. The student must ensure that he stays focused on the group tasks and knows what he is required to do and effectively performs his role.
He should provide support and appreciate other team members’ efforts towards the group tasks. He should attend all group meetings punctually and hand in all his work as required. He has to take individual responsibility for tasks without depending heavily on other group members to do most of the assigned tasks.
His listening and questioning during discussion should portray respect towards all members as well as creating harmony rather than causing conflict within the group members. He should set aside some time to research and gather information routinely and other useful ideas to be shared with group members.
His problem-solving skills should be exemplary through actively looking and providing suggestions on how problems may be solved. Active participation in the group is of utmost importance and will be considered in grading and rewarding the student.
Incentives
In order to win students to participate, incentives will be offered to good performing students. There will be scholarships for $2000 awarded to the top 2% of the 12th grade students. This will encourage them to aim higher in the upcoming finalist assessments. It will also encourage the other lower grades students to start aiming higher as early as possible in whichever grades they are in.
There will also be a Day Trip to an amusement park or similar activity for the top 5% of each grade. This will increase the number of students who receive recognition in order to prevent the development of the mentality that ‘rewards are for the genius only’ among the students. It will make students feel that they too can receive the award if they work hard enough.
There will also be a Day at the Park for top 10% of each grade and Awards Day honors for the top 15% of each grade. This further increases the number of students receiving awards. It is also providing an aura of fun in the whole project process so as to make the students feel that participation in the project will not only provide him with an opportunity to excel academically, but also a chance to have fun in the process.
Supporting End-of-Grade Assessments
The End-of-Grade assessments in themselves may not be enough to yield the intended results of students and schools achievement of college and career readiness. Thus schools will need to develop other assessment tools to augment the results achieved by these assessments. Schools may choose from 2 choices, or adopt both of them, from which to implement the supports.
One option would be to develop new courses, modules and interventions for students to who are struggling in middle and early high school and students who are not college- and career ready on the anchor assessment to alleviate the various weaknesses they exhibit.
The second option would be to provide professional development to high school faculty. The school should provide opportunities for training and developmental needs of teachers to increase their assessment skills and competency.
Of particular importance, is formulating programs designed to educate the assessors and administrators the objective of the assessment and the importance of student performance to measure student growth.
It also helps to determine the extent to which the schools goals of college and career readiness of students have been realized. The training “will serve to enhance the formative uses of the…assessments and better equip teachers to use complementary assessment strategies to impact student learning,” (Way, et al 2011, P. 24).
To identify student’s weaknesses and diagnose them early enough, the school can use data from assessments given in 8th, 9th and 10th grades, along with course grades and other key early indicators.
For courses in the junior and senior years, encourage K-12 and higher education institutions to partner and collaborate to develop new courses and teaching units and support better teaching and student success. If resources are limited, use results from anchor assessment to focus resources on Mathematics or English. The school should ensure that assessments are fair to all students.
The fairness is achieved by ensuring that the instruments, practices, policies used are fair to all students, and that all the learners receive fair treatment so that their present and future opportunities are not limited.
In addition, this principle is achieved through this systems flexibility of allowing the use of numerous assessment and provision of multiple and equivalent ways through which the students can express their knowledge and understanding of various concepts taught in school.
This third principle is also achieved by ensuring that the assessments are created and appropriately adapted to meet each of the specific needs of particular student population, for example, students with special needs and therefore require special attention, (Thurlow, Elliott & Ysseldyke, 1998).
Incorporating performance measures
“A school performance measurement system is an integral part of the educational management control system,” (Harrison, et al 2008, P. 6). To improve summative tests the school will be required to determine how to incorporate performance measures.
The main reason for reviewing the current performance standards is to “lift participation, increase engagement, and raise achievement in education right across the education system,” (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2008). The performance measures to be adopted should be in line with the overall goal of equipping students for further education or for future career opportunities.
In other words, the performance measures should be acceptable to the various stakeholders involved. These stakeholders include not only the students and teachers but also the parents as well as the government. District schools should give them a chance to voice their recommendations.
Thus the first step the schools should take is to determine if performance assessments should ‘roll up’ to factor as one measure in high school accountability or if they have stake for students as the main stakeholders. The framework to be incorporated must also be “decision relevance,” (Mayston, 1985) i.e., should facilitate easy decision making.
The measures adopted should be aimed at increasing students’ performance as the primary goal before considering the interests of other stakeholders. Failure to incorporate student’s needs will only result to chaos. They should ensure that the measures are accepted by the students so as to gain legitimacy, without which they may not function effectively. Depending on their decision in this stage, they may proceed to the next stage.
The second step is choosing an option among the available ones. The first option will be to require all students to complete graduation projects. This will be specific to the particular school. They are aimed at setting scorecards to ensure the school’s ability to cope in the rather competitive educational sphere.
However, they only benchmark performance within the school and do not compare results with other schools of the same level. The school should therefore determine level of state involvement in scoring and set standards for graduation projects and use them as the guiding principles to setting their own measures.
The major advantage state standards “is that students can be motivated to invest more in their own learning by being given direct feedback on their academic performance, benchmarked against statewide standards, and by bearing consequences, ranging from retention in grade withholding diplomas, for failure to meet those standards,” (Fuhrman & Elmore 2003, P. 278)
The second alternative available to the school is developing their own initiated performance measures and recommending them to other schools to be used as the widely accepted and applied standards.
This will only happen if the measures recommended seem highly rational and general enough to accommodate the performance needs of each school. This will ensure that the school’s needs and requirements are adequately represented in the final draft to be adopted by all schools.
The third option would be to encourage districts to create performance assessments via incentives. In this option, each school will have their own performance measurements and it will provide a good checklist from which to make comparative evaluations with such other schools.
The final option would be to leave it entirely up to school districts to come up with a performance standard universal to all schools in that district. The school will be required to comply with the performance measurements adopted.
Performance measurements should be created using professional collaboration and development. This is done by involving educators and professionals who understand full range of the assessment purposes.
The professional will use a variety of suitable methods, work as a team, and engage each other in an ongoing professional development in order to improve their ability and capacity as assessors. These professional teachers strengthen their competence by utilizing resources recommended by the state for assessments.
Summative Assessment
For balanced assessment, summative assessment will be conducted through the current Design framework for Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). “This is an alliance of 25 states working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and Math anchored in what it takes to be ready for college and careers,” (PARCC, 2011).
It’s aimed at building a gateway to colleges and preparing students for careers in the future as well as creating a high-quality assessment according to the state standards put in place. It will also support teachers in classrooms and advance an all-level-accountability system by making maximum use of technology since the framework is intended to be computer based by 2014-15.
Summative assessments are used “to measure the level of success or proficiency that students have obtained at the end of an instructional unit or course,” (Shaw, 2010). The assessment system is composed of a Through-Course assessments and End-of-Year assessments.
The Through-Course assessments will be used to measure accountability awaiting verification and are to be administered periodically through-out the academic year. This will be done through performance oriented standards which are typically hard to measure, and provide feedback to the various tutors to determine any need for review of instructional practice.
The assessment results will be standardized and will be integrated to the final scores of each individual student. This assessment will have various benefits to the students; the multiple assessments will present a student with several opportunities to prove their knowledge and skills and also improve their ability to perform tasks.
By providing early indicators, the feedback obtained will help teachers take corrective measures, if necessary, to the instruction practices they adopted through their teachings.
The End-of-year assessments, on the other hand, will cover a wider range of content standards than the through-course assessments. It will require students to read excerpts of a certain complexity level and respond to computer-scored cognitively challenging and innovative items for a quick turn-around of results.
Results Usage
The assessment results obtained will be comparable across states at the student level and will be required to meet the international set standards. This provides a standard through which the school can measure its performance levels with.
“Schools that improve their grades are eligible for financial recognition awards, while technical and expanded additional financial assistance is provided to low-performing schools to improve students’ reading, writing, and math skills,” (Government Program Summaries, 2002).
If the school does not measure up to the state standards then it is required to review its instructional practices and adopt more improved ones. They will be useful in measuring student’s longitudinal growth to identify college and career readiness benchmarks and will inform the administration as well as the state determine whether such students are adequately qualified to join colleges.
This will support accountability in making decisions about which student should be rewarded and who is qualified to graduate.
It will also evaluate teachers and various administration leaders’ competencies and identify and plan for training and developmental needs for them through higher educational institutions. They will also determine the accountability of the school as a whole and use them to support instructional improvement.
Transition Plan
All the transition envisioned to change from The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) will continue as aligned to the Tennessee state college and career ready Standard during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years. This is to give other stakeholders to voice their contributions which may be required to finalize the project.
However, the TCAP assessments will transition, where appropriate, in Reading/Language Arts and Math beginning in 2012-13 academic years so as to facilitate alignment of the tests according to the latest version of academic performance measures.
TCAP assessments will conclude the PARCC assessment model in English/Language Arts and Math in 2014-2015 as the timeline for all the transitions. During the 2010-11 and 2011-12 that TCAP assessments will still be in application, it will include a Construed Response Diagnostic Assessment for Grades 3 and 7.
Conclusion
The reason why it is important to adopt the above state sanctioned methods of assessment is to ensure that our high school graduates have what it takes in terms of academic expectations before venturing out into the future. It also helps reduce disparities in student’s performances resulting from the application of different instructional practices by various schools. This has been evident through various researches conducted.
A more recent research conducted in Minnesota revealed that “substantial differences in the math and science content students were taught, depending on whether their schools served predominantly high or low-income students,” (College and Career-Ready Policy Institute Assessment Working Group 2010, P. 28). Thus harmonization in assessment and accountability systems in different schools is required.
The assessment and accountability system will bring about major changes in schools’ instructional practices. Further, the standardized tests will be a rational method of to holding school’s accountability. This will be so if the performance measures take into consideration of all stakeholders’ interests when being formulated.
From the ongoing technological advancements and improved assessment systems, district schools may explore alternatives possible in the future. Schools should investigate new methodologies to be used in evaluating the ability of students to reason and critical thinking skills as well as the ability to perform complex tasks.
References
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