ASSESSMENT PROGRAM/SYSTEM

Institution's current assessment program/system

Institution's current assessment program/system

A) Why Is School Reform Occurring?

Widespread belief that schools are not helping all students achieve at the levels that are needed, has spurred efforts to reform our schools. Concerns have been raised that the ways we teach students, as well as assess them, do not lead students to acquire needed knowledge or skills, nor help them apply and use their knowledge and skills appropriately. At the national and state levels, content standards containing the types of knowledge, skills and behaviors now believed needed for all students to achieve at high levels are being developed. Starting with such efforts as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM,1989), content standards are being developed in the arts, civics, economics, English, foreign languages, geography, health education, history, physical education, science, and social studies.

School reform is also motivated by the belief that there are competencies needed for graduates to enter the workforce successfully. The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills developed generic competencies and foundation skills that all workers will need in the future (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). They include flexible problem solving, respecting the desires of the customer, working well on teams, taking responsibility for one's own performance, and continuous learning and have been developed to guide the efforts of educational reform in the direction helping more students to make the transition to work successfully.

Collectively, these standards represent substantial challenges for the American schools. They imply that all students will need to achieve at much higher levels. New strategies for assessment are also implied by these content standards.

Types Of Assessments

New content standards may require different assessment methods. Among the assessment techniques now being considered are short-answer, open-ended; extended-response, open-ended; individual interviews; performance events; performance tasks in which students have extended time; projects; portfolios; observations; and anecdotal records, in addition to multiple-choice exercises. A broader repertoire of techniques is increasingly being used.

School Improvement Strategies

The information about student achievement needed at various levels of the educational system is different. Parents have different needs that teachers, who in turn, have different needs than school principals. District administrators need broader, system-wide information, while at the state level, there is concern about equity across districts and identification of state priorities. Nationally, policy makers are concerned about differences between states and how competitive American students are with their peers in other countries.

Improving student achievement can take place at each of these levels. Teachers work with an individual student in a classroom, or revamp classroom-wide instruction based on an assessment. At the school level, educators use school information to set long-and-short-range objectives and decide how to accomplish these. At the district level, educators target particular areas of the curriculum for attention. At the state level, incentives for improving instructional programs may be most important. School reform occurs at all levels of the educational system.

Useful Assessment Designs

Typically, student achievement is measured with available student test data, often using information from district or state testing ...