After they have finished their finals, and before their celebratory field trip to Hershey Park, all WW-P eighth graders must complete their “Eighth-Grade Assessment,” a week-long collaborative student project. Though not graded, the project is not just busy work. It is an intensive, hands-on effort between teams of four to six students, addressing real-world problems for which the students attempt to develop real-world answers. The teams with the “best” solutions then communicate their projects via Skype with real-world professionals representing the United Nations, the World Bank, Princeton University, non-governmental organizations, and other not-for-profit groups.
Though the project is designed to be carried out by the students, they are not the ones being “assessed”— in fact, this program is designed to assess the district itself. The brainchild of Mark Wise, pictured above, supervisor of K-12 curriculum and instruction, the eighth grade assessment is designed to determine how well the district is preparing students in the 21st-century competencies.
The “competencies” are designed to make a student become an innovative and practical problem server; an effective communicator; a collaborative team member; a flexible and self-directed learner; an information-literate researcher; and a globally aware, active, and responsible student-citizen.
“All six of these elements are present in the assessment projects; we are using them to determine how well the students have been trained in each of the six competencies. This is not about assessing the students, or their teachers. This assessment is designed to measure how well we have educated the children from kindergarten through eighth grade,” Wise said.
Though the students are expected to take the projects seriously and work well together to complete it, they are not graded. “They are scored as a group, not individually, using a rubric that tracks the six competencies. The groups with the best scores are given the chance to interact with professionals, but, other than that, there is no grading involved for the students,” Wise says. “The scores are then aggregated by category, so that we now have a means to measure how well we are meeting the district’s mission.”
“There is no specific training that the students need right before the project begins; there is no need for them to prepare ahead of time. I like to think of this assessment as a ‘physical exam’ for the district. You don’t train or prepare for your annual physical, you just want to see how healthy you are. The same is true for the district. We are using it to measure ‘how healthy’ our education model is.”
Wise explains the background of this program. “When I was teaching an AP Government course in Edison in 1996, I ‘ran’ for U.S. Senate. I was a puppet candidate, of course, but my name was really on the ballet. The class and I wrote a platform, created our own political party, our campaign strategy — everything. It was a great experience for the kids, and I wanted to find a way to institutionalize this for all students. I also attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. We developed plans to save Social Security that we presented to the professors. The winning team discussed their proposal with then-President Bill Clinton. I wanted to combine these two fantastic programs and come up with a learning opportunity that was also an assessment of our district’s programs as well, and so these two experiences became the genesis for the eighth-grade assessment program.”
In its current form, the eighth-grade assessment centers around a problem or a cause. This year, the students had three different options: to pick a country, and then identify the biggest challenge or problem that country faces economically; to choose an environmental policy issue, and then find a country impacted by this problem; or, new this year, to pick an NGO, and recharacterize its message to raise awareness among students. The student groups contained four to six students, who were chosen by staff, and all included a range of students, so that every eighth grader, regardless of ability, could equally participate.
The students had to include an electronic media presentation; create a poster, pamphlet, or other physical product; recognize their target audience; conduct research; communicate their message; and work collaboratively. They were given several hours each day to work together on the project but had very little instruction or direct supervision from the teaching staff.
The final step in the process: each group had to present its project to a panel of judges. The panels consisted of teachers, parents, district administrators, Board of Education members, community members and leaders, business owners, and other adults. The groups that scored the highest through the judges’ rating system were the ones who skyped with professionals.
The district invited me to serve as one of the judges. (In addition to being a writer for the WW-P News, I am a parent of students entering sixth and fifth grades in the fall and am involved in the PTA). Being a judge consisted of receiving intensive training on the overall program as well as issue-specific training based on the topic to be judged. We also received an explanation of how the grading system, worked, as well as a demonstration on how the online grading system worked, which included a video and mock grading session. After the training was completed, the judge panels spent the next four hours watching and rating five to seven student groups.
I was assigned to a panel that was reviewing students who had selected the third option: raising awareness and understanding of an NGO at the student level. Our students groups had selected either Pro Mujer or Working Girls Group, both of which are involved in raising awareness of issues faced by girls and women, including educational and economic disadvantages, mistreatment and abuse, and other inequalities.
I found it difficult to rate the students because it was apparent that they had all worked very hard and taken the project very seriously. Each of the groups had something unique to offer, and every time we thought we had decided which group was the “best,” another group would come in and present something that impressed us all over again. Some groups all worked together on every aspect of the project; others divided up the different components. Many groups took advantage of one or more students’ “special” abilities, such as Spanish fluency or artistic talent.
Each group’s video presentation was outstanding — certainly better than most adults could produce — but the glitzier presentations were not always the ones that received the highest marks. One group, recognizing that its target audience was students and others from less economically advantaged locales, used old-fashioned “pull-tags” on their paper posters, which impressed our panel of judges. In addition to their presentations, the students had to answer questions posed to them by the judges. Though understandably nervous, the students were able to give coherent answers to our queries, which also exhibited their significant level of preparation.
Each panel of judges was supposed to pick one “winner”; however, we ended up recommending two groups because we just couldn’t make the final cut between two very different and very well done projects.
“Previously, although of course we kept track of how well we were educating our students, it was more of an amorphous system,” noted Wise. “Since we instituted the eighth grade assessments, we have a systemic approach for measuring our progress, and have real data to help us institute needed changes. Just using the NJASK test scores is not enough.”
For instance, past assessments revealed that students’ ability to conduct research, especially electronically, was an area of relative weakness. This realization, based on the data collected from the assessments, led to the creation of the district’ technology study group, and, through the group’s recommendations, the implementation of the new technology plan, which will take effect beginning in the upcoming school year (see the June 7 issue of the News).
In addition to the student scores, all of the stakeholders — the students, judges, and teaching staff — are asked to fill out qualitative surveys about the program. Wise has reviewed some of the preliminary findings. “The students overall really enjoyed the project, especially those who worked on the third option, which was new this year. We hope to include even more NGOs next year. They also seemed to prefer being able to choose an issue, and find a country being affected by that issue, rather than picking the country first. So that is a change we are contemplating for next year; having four issues to choose from: environmental, health, education, and hunger, and letting the students pick the issue first.”
“One issue we noted was that some got too involved in describing what their organization was, rather than addressing their presentations to their target audiences. This is an area we will focus on more next year,” Wise said.
“In the four years that the eighth grade assessment has been in place, we have improved it every year both in terms of how well the measurement works, and how interesting the assignments are for the students. Now that the eighth grade assessment program is established, and is producing measurable results, we hope to expand the program. Our goal is to have an assessment in place for the three transition grades in our district: third, fifth, and eighth grades.”
This past year the district started a pilot program for a similar assessment aimed at third graders. “It was our first foray into this type of assessment for younger students, and our first job will be to assess the task to see if it is was appropriate for third graders, and also if it was actually measuring what we need it to measure,” says Wise. “We found that the pilot was not administered uniformly, and the students did not really respond uniformly, so we need to work on this program more to see if we can make it work for third graders as well. But it was a good first step.”
“Because the fifth grade students are starting the Google chrome pilot program next year [through the new technology plan] we will wait to see how that plays out before we start another pilot program for fifth graders.”
“But we are very pleased with how the program has progressed at the eighth grade level. This year we had 50 groups identified as “winners,” so approximately 250 students were able to interact with the experts through Skype. We had 54 individual Skype conference calls stretching from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Los Angeles. The students were so excited about discussing their proposals with the professionals — it didn’t matter to them whether they were speaking with a UN representative or a consultant. And the organizations were very pleased with the students’ work as well, particularly the NGOs. They were very impressed with the ideas the students came up with,” says Wise.
“We view the whole experience as a success.”
