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By BEN BRAGDON GREENVILLE — Due to the shifting philosophies of educational assessment, "1-2-3-4's" will slowly replace the ABC's as Maine's grading standard, and educators in Greenville are figuring how to best handle what Superintendent Steve Pound calls a "major, major shift" in the way student work is scored. School officials are now working on the development and implementation of a Local Assessment System (LAS), a group of state-required testing procedures used to measure the knowledge of the subject matter laid out in the Maine Learning Results. Greenville teacher Becky Brown told the Greenville School Committee last week that the new standards-based approach is superior to the old method in that it offers a more comprehensive look at what a student really understands about a subject rather than judging, like many tests, how well they plug numbers into a formula or remember a certain fact without context. "Sometimes when we test a kid, we learn more about the test than we do about the kid we are testing," she said. When the Learning Results were enacted in 1997, Brown said, "American students couldn't think. They couldn't problem solve. They could manipulate numbers." The Learning Results were a response to that trend, and the assessments, which rate a student's understanding of the required subjects, put greater weight on problem solving and allow a student more than one way to demonstrate their knowledge. An example Brown gave to the board, for middle school mathematics, asks students to use two smaller patterns with identical ratios of gray and white blocks to extrapolate the numbers of each in much larger patterns. Students are then asked to explain their answers in words and to write equations expressing those words. The student is also asked to make connections between answers arrived at through different processes. The assessment then needs to be scored, entering into the picture criteria and scoring levels quite different than those familiar to most adults. Instead of adding up the total wrong answers and subtracting that from 100 to get a number score and a corresponding letter grade, assessments are scored 1-4 on a number of criteria. A "1" shows little evidence of knowledge and competency, while a "4" shows a sophisticated demonstration of the criteria, with the student's work exceeding the standards. A "3" score is proficient, meaning a student has met the needed standard. Pound said the assessment identifies a child's problem areas better than before, allowing teachers to correct learning issues along the way. "A student that is not at the center level, we can re-teach them," he said. A new scoring system brings plenty of logistical problems, all of which need to be worked out as the implementation moves forward. The current freshmen class at Greenville High School will be the first to graduate under the new standards, which under law must make it on to a student report sometime this school year. The first report may not go to parents until summer 2005, Brown said, as the school system grapples with the best way to implement the new scoring standard, though a lot of work has been done to get the school this far. Starting in March, volunteers met weekly through the end of school to plug assessments provided by the state into each standard, making sure that the tests properly measured the expectations laid out for each grade level. This summer, educators met to work the assessments into the curriculum, and teachers around the school have been educated on the new approach. Now, administrators have to work on a strategy for replacing the current "ABC" system with the standards-based approach, and have to work with teachers to make sure that the assessments are reliable and consistent. Officials will also have to inform parents of the new standard, and be prepared for some growing pains along the way. "When a child gets a ‘2', we have to be ready to say what that means, and what we can give a child," said Brown. The schools will set a series of parent meetings some time in the near future, she said. They also have to set conditions for graduation, determining, for instance, how many below-standard "2" scores a student will be allowed, and whether a GHS diploma will be offered, with different standards, next to a Maine Learning Results diploma. "In the end," said Pound, "(the students) have to meet the standards." |