![[Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
[Chapter 3: Case Study Summaries Part 2 of 5] Assessment of Student Performance April 1997
As described in the previous chapter, we visited 16 schools in order to study the implementation of performance assessments that were initiated at various levels of educational authority — state, district, and school — and through various national-level education reform efforts. We visited nine schools a single time during the 1993-94 or 1994-95 school year, and we visited seven schools twice, once during each of the two school years. The 16 case study summaries that follow are organized according to these two factors: the number of visits to the school and the level of initiation of the performance assessment under study.
Summary case studies appear as follows:
Summaries of Two-Visit Case Studies
Summaries of Single-Visit Case Studies
These summaries are drawn from more detailed case study reports, which can be found in the second volume of this report, Studies of Education Reform: Assessment of Student Performance — Volume 2: Case Studies. ( All participant schools have been assigned pseudonyms.)
In 1989, having decided that it could no longer operate Cooper Middle School as a "mini high school" and expect to meet the needs of their students, Cooper staff launched a comprehensive school reform program. As part of this program, Cooper Middle School became a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools.
Cooper's assessment reform is an integral component of its larger reform program. Cooper teachers develop and use performance assessments based upon the principles and philosophy of education expounded by the Coalition.
Reflecting the Santa Fe, New Mexico, community at large, 54 percent of Cooper's approximately 640 students are white, 45 percent are Hispanic, and less than 1 percent are Native American.
The Coalition of Essential Schools was established in 1984, at Brown University, as a school-university partnership to help redesign schools. The reform work of member schools is guided by a set of nine "Common Principles," intended to provide a broad framework for reform activities.
One of the nine common principles pertains to assessment and states that students should be awarded a diploma only upon successfully demonstrating — through an exhibition — that they have acquired the skills and knowledge central to the school's program.
Information from the Coalition's research and development activities is disseminated to member schools and to other interested audiences through its newsletter and other publications. The Coalition also holds regional and national conferences, as well as round-table discussions centered around a variety of reform concerns — such as exhibitions of student work and pedagogical strategies.
As part of its reform program, Cooper organized itself into family groups comprised of a core group of teachers and students. Throughout the 1993-94 academic year, each of the two 8th-grade families were composed of six teachers and a group of students, and each of the two 7th-grade families were composed of five teachers and a group of students.
For the 1994-95 academic year, however, the family structure was altered to form three teams of teachers in the 7th-grade, and two teams of three teachers and one team of six teachers in the 8th-grade. Cooper teachers made this alteration to better represent all subject areas within each family group. In addition, teachers believed that smaller family sizes would be more conducive to planning, implementing, and evaluating the family-based curriculum and assessment systems.
Following the Coalition philosophy, each family presents its curriculum materials focused on ". . . essential questions that lead students to final assessments centered on their abilities to use critical thinking skills in order to solve real-world problems." The focus on critical thinking and social skills is provided through thematic units integrating skills, knowledge domains, instructional strategies, and assessment systems. All thematic units and assessments are designed by teachers themselves.
In 1994-95, in addition to changing the family structure, teachers changed the extent to which they used thematic units for covering content areas. Teachers placed less emphasis on thematic units as the preferred pedagogical strategy. This change was most significant for mathematics.
Cooper teachers design performance assessments:
Reportedly, assessment development is guided by the Coalition's method of planning backwards. Teachers first delineate the skills and knowledge they want their students to be able to demonstrate at the end of a period of time and then design thematic units around those skills and knowledge outcomes. Next, teachers design assignments, such as essays, research projects, and debates, through which students demonstrate their proficiency with respect to those skills and knowledge outcomes.
In addition to completing the family-based projects and assessments, each student is required to keep a portfolio of his or her work, undergo the Rite of Passage Experience (ROPE), and answer an Open-ended Interdisciplinary Question at the end of the 8th grade. None of these assessments, however, is required for graduating from the middle school.
| Court of Law An 8th-grade family held a mock court trial as the culminating activity of a thematic unit entitled Freedom and Responsibility. The topic of the trial was, Should the United States ban the sale, manufacture, and use of cigarettes? One judge, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, witnesses, a jury, a transcriber, and a court marshal, all played by 8th-grade students, constituted the "court." Other students sat in the audience. One at a time, the lawyers put forth well-informed arguments, produced expert testimony and witnesses, cross-examined one another's witnesses, and delivered closing statements. After a brief deliberation, the jury rendered its verdict. The "proceedings" lasted about fifty minutes. At the conclusion of the mock trial, all students were required to produce a persuasive piece of writing based upon the court proceedings, which was to be incorporated into individual student portfolios. |
Each assignment is scored using a scoring rubric that outlines the dimensions of the assignment to be graded and the maximum score value for each dimension. For example, for an essay, What is a Hero?, the scoring rubric established three dimensions: Writing Skills—spelling, punctuation, and syntax;Content—the exposition of the qualities heroes must possess; and Format— an introduction and a conclusion.
Cooper teachers have participated in several professional development activities over the past few years. In addition, the Coalition sent researchers to help teachers develop their curriculum and instructional and assessment strategies. Few of the teachers interviewed, however, remembered receiving in-house professional support geared towards the development and use of performance assessments. Teachers during both 1993-94 and 1994-95 emphasized their need for more training and in-house support for the specific purpose of designing and using assessments and thematic units.
According to the principal, although Cooper teachers support the reform program, the "transition has been difficult." Teachers shoulder the demanding task of fashioning their own thematic units and assessments a process that is time-consuming and exhausting.
For many teachers, among the other issues that need further attention are the quality and design of the assessments and the appropriateness of their teaching methods. In 1993-94, some teachers were worried that the quality of their assessments (i.e., reliability and validity) might be questionable; by the 1994-95 school year, this worry extended to the appropriateness of their teaching methods as well, particularly for mathematics. In 1994-95, teachers also observed that it had become increasingly difficult for many of them to be generalists and teach several subject areas.
Many of the concerns teachers had were identified and discussed during the Summer of 1994. For example, teachers discussed their students' ROPE performance and noted that students rarely mentioned mathematics in their presentations. Furthermore, many teachers were disappointed in their students' ITBS mathematics scores. Cooper teachers came to the conclusion that teaching mathematics mostly through thematic units and applied problems was not adequate for instilling in their students a good understanding of the discipline. As a result, in 1994-95, Cooper teachers reverted to a more direct, traditional approach to the teaching of mathematics.
Teachers redefined other disciplinary areas as well, and began placing more emphasis on traditional teaching methods.
In 1993-94, according to the two students interviewed, the thematic units were enjoyable and confusing. They mentioned that most students were uncertain of which teacher taught what subject and that they did not understand how the subjects were interrelated within thematic units or what they were expected to know at the end of a unit. These students articulated the desire for ". . . more organization of themes — everything is mixed up in themes; we don't know where we are.
By 1994-95, many of these problems had been alleviated, primarily as a result of clearer identification of traditional subject areas and due to the changes in the family structure. Most students reported that their classes were "pretty separated," and they knew when they were studying mathematics, science, English, and other subjects.
Cooper enjoys a good reputation within the community. In 1993-94, according to one school board member, the board was "very pleased and supportive of it [the school]." In 1994-95, the school board member had a similarly high opinion of Cooper. He did, however, express the need to establish a rigorous, district-wide accountability system, as he was distressed about the fact that the district scored on the lower end of ITBS.
In both years, all parent participants were supportive of Cooper's philosophy of education and teachers' use of project-based work, but some also expressed concerns over children's exposure to content areas. Parents also expressed concern over what they perceived to be a weak scoring system, low standards, and a lack of clearly defined outcomes.
In the near future, Cooper staff plan to address a number of outstanding and important issues, not the least of which is to define better assessment and measurement of student outcomes.
Developed in Great Britain, the Primary Language Record (PLR), and its offshoot, the Primary Learning Record (PLeR), both provide teachers with a structured method of tracking young children's academic development and planning individualized instruction to meet students' needs (the PLR does so specifically in terms of language skills and the PLeR tracks all subject areas).
The PLR and the PLeR are being modified and adopted in several parts of the United States. In New York City, implementation of the PLR and PLeR is facilitated by the New York City Assessment Network (NYAN), a consortium of education organizations dedicated to supporting the use of performance assessments by New York City teachers.
Teachers at Park Elementary School work with one NYAN member organization to use the PLR and, beginning in the 1994-95 school year, the PLeR with their students. Because Park teachers switched from the PLR to the PLeR during the course of this study, the combined term "PLR/PLeR" will be used throughout this summary to designate facts or opinions applicable to both versions of the assessment, while the terms will be used separately to distinguish between the two versions.
As designed, the PLR/PLeR is intended to accomplish two primary purposes:
As the PLR/PLeR is implemented in schools working with NYAN, it is the first of these purposes that is of primary importance.
The developers of the PLR/PLeR recognized that teachers are not the only individuals in children's lives who have insights into their language development. Therefore, the PLR/PLeR process is designed specifically to draw upon multiple perspectives of a child's development. To be as comprehensive as possible in its record, then, the PLR/PLeR process:
The PLR/PLeR consists of two types of record forms:
In 1991, three organizations, the Center for Collaborative Education, the Center for Educational Options, and the Elementary Teachers Network joined to establish the New York City Assessment Network (NYAN). The three organizations formed NYAN because of their shared commitment to introducing their teacher colleagues to the PLR. Teachers at NYAN's member schools began using the PLR in the early 1990's, and some, but not all, of these teachers subsequently shifted to using the PLeR.
All three organizations that comprise NYAN provide extensive professional support to their member teachers. Each organization has on its staff one or more "teacher consultant," whose job it is to work with teachers who are using the PLR/PLeR in their classrooms. These teacher consultants work individually with teachers and organize and lead "study groups" devoted to enhancing teachers' ability to use the PLR/PLeR.
Park Elementary School is a magnet school in New York City's District Four. Founded 20 years ago, the school's guiding philosophy is to provide a child-centered education. During the 1993-94 school year, Park served about 250 pre-kindergarten through 6th-grade students; these students were white (18 percent), African-American (36 percent), Hispanic (42 percent), and Asian-American (4 percent). Students must apply for admission to the school, but admissions are made by lottery.
About half of Park's teachers have chosen voluntarily to participate in NYAN through the Center for Collaborative Education's (CCE) Elementary School Assessment Project, whose mission is "to develop the use of qualitative assessment techniques for instructing and evaluating children's learning in the New York public school system, . . . using highly detailed observations and descriptions to capture the richness of children's learning." The PLR/PLeR is the tool chosen by CCE (and NYAN) to help teachers acquire and use those techniques espoused in the mission.
Because the PLR/PLeR is consistent with the educational philosophy already espoused by Park teachers, its impact as a distinct educational tool on the school's teachers and students is difficult to evaluate. However, it is clear that using the PLR/PLeR requires a significant amount of time and discipline on the part of teachers, and it is equally clear that those Park teachers who have chosen to use the PLR/PLeR find it to be a valuable addition to their teaching strategies.
Park teachers vary with respect to how much they believe using the PLR/PLeR has affected the way in which they work with children. One teacher said, "The PLR helps me individualize instruction more . . . but there is no huge change [in my instructional methods], only fine tuning." Another teacher noted that she values collaborative teaching more than she did formerly and that the PLR has bolstered her confidence in her ability to observe accurately what her students are doing and learning. All Park teachers who use the PLR/PLeR stress its validity for individualized instruction. In the words of one teacher, "Assessment is instruction," meaning that ongoing assessment of children's progress must guide instruction and that careful, systematic assessment designed to inform instruction, particularly as it is tailored to the individual child, is inherently valid.
Teachers at Park Elementary say that they took the switch to the PLeR in stride. In fact, just as some Park Elementary teachers said that they were "doing PLR" before there was a PLR, teachers who used the PLR also said that they had already begun to use it to track children's progress in all subject areas before they actually started working with the PLeR. Thus, the switch to the PLeR came naturally to them.
According to teachers, students take the PLR/PLeR in stride, often asking, "Are you going to write down what I did?" One significant use teachers at Park have put the PLR/PLeR to is to aid them in their documentation while in the process of declassifying special education students. Park's special education teacher believes that the PLR/PLeR would make a good substitute for individualized educational programs as well.
Teachers report that parents like the PLR/PLeR, and that they especially like the parent-teacher-student conferences devoted to discussing the child's literacy development. Several parents have told teachers that they have never before been asked to share their knowledge of their children.
| Using the PLeR Yvonne Smith's pre-K/K classroom is full of energetic young students working at different work tables where they build with blocks, draw, dress up, bake, and observe the class' pet gerbils. Yvonne moves among the children, observing their activities and talking with them about what they are doing. In one instance, Yvonne watches Alberto, a Hispanic boy for whom English is a second language, working at the sand table. She asks him what he has built in the sand, and he responds, "a bump." Yvonne recognizes that this word is a new one for Alberto. She shares with him two other words he could use to describe what he has built, "hill" and "mountain." She then asks Alberto how many words he has to describe it. He says, "Two." Yvonne holds up two fingers and asks, "Do you have this many, or," holding up three fingers, "this many?" Alberto realizes he has said "two" when he means "three," and Yvonne realizes that he is still translating numbers from Spanish to English in his mind. Yvonne says she will use what she has learned from this observation and interaction to select reading materials that reinforce Alberto's growing English vocabulary (i.e., books that have hills, mountains, and bumps in them) and that use numbers in both English and Spanish. |
The PLR/PLeR is an example of an assessment technique designed to inform curriculum and instruction. Park is a school in which teacher inquiry and teacher collaboration are encouraged. In such an environment the interweaving of assessment with curriculum and instruction as fostered by the PLR/PLeR or other techniques comes naturally to teachers, at least after practice.
-###-
[Chapter 2: Study Objectives and Design] [Chapter 3: Case Study Summaries Part 2 of 5]