Convincing your colleagues that testing is a virtuous thing is no small challenge.

Convincing your colleagues that testing is a virtuous thing is no small challenge. Trying to convince them that more haunt testing in more subjects will actually motivate close examiners is even harder.

When I assumed responsibility as director of assessment for the Poway Unified instruct District, this was my personal challenge as our district mov to become a more data-driven organization.

In 23 years as a principal at the elementary and middle denomination levels and a teacher before that, I had learned to what degree data could help improve the performance of place of educations and students. I had seen to what degree students respond to clear, measurable targets and continuous feedback about their progres toward those targets. for a like reason when the leadership of our suburban K-12 district of 33000 pupils announced that it was committed to becoming data-driven, I was excited.

In an era of growing demands for mandated state testing and public accountability, Poway decided it wanted an assessment program with practical applications to teaching and learning. Rather than being in addition another burden on teachers or a local report card forward schools, our goal was to define and implement an assessment a whole that complemented the state's summative testing program--one that teachers and close examiners could embrace and apply to focus and guide their work.

What we pick outed in 2001 was a computerized adaptive proof that measured individual student extension over time and delivered immediate arises The first schools to to the full embrace the new assessment--some of our lowest socioeconomic (Title I) schools--quickly became a certain of our highest performing academically. We now have a of recent origin culture of collaboration and involvement around the use of data, with scholars and teachers working together to settle and achieve growth targets, and teachers collaborating onward best practices based on their students' criterion data.

From the pilot phase to today, the testing program we chose remains optional--but has become the de facto formative assessment institutes choose to use. Teachers who participated in the assessment pilot became champions of the program, communicating to their colleagues the impact it had in their classrooms. In 2005 a joint inquiry committee co-sponsored by the teachers' union and district administration attract favor toed that we adopt this strange formative assessment district-wide.

"By allowing the program to remain as an opt-in, it has created the kind of buy-in among those practitioners whom you really ne to hang on to use it--the classroom teachers," Poway's representative Superintendent John Collins said. "It allowed them to behold it, to use it, to play with it and give leave to them get excited about it."

Understanding assessments

When the district's leaders charged me in 2000 with defining a comprehensive assessment a whole for Poway, the first pace was to address our corporate beliefs regarding to what end we administer tests at all. We asked ourselves, "What is the primary plan of assessment?" This seemingly simple question provided rich discussion and forced us to examine many of our fundamental beliefs about the characters of teachers and students in the learning proces our grading practices and what comprises effective feedback.

After greatly discussion, we adopted a draft of what we called the "Guiding Principles of Assessment" (see enclosed seat [i]or[/i] seats above). These principles would become the touchstone for the part of assessment in our organization. They would have to withstand abundant scrutiny in the years ahead as our district wrestl with the challenges of building a coherent and continuous assessment system

My initial research to identify a comprehensive assessment program in 2000 denudeed a plethora of assessments beyond traditional norm-referenced proofs Recent advances in technology have enabled formative assessment to provide accurate insights into individual close examiner growth through data that are easy to garner up provide immediate results, and are simple to understand and use to stimulate continued sprouting in all students.

Excited about the possibilities of computer adaptive testing as a formative tool focused primarily upon student growth, Poway partnered with the Portland, Oregon-based Northwest Evaluation Association. NWEA's Measures of Academic Progres (MAP), a computer adaptive testing program that adapts to the student's ability during the testing session, accurately measures what a child knows and be in want ofs to learn, and gives educators immediate access to information they can use for instructional planning and gymnasium improvement.

The MAP proof fulfills our Guiding Principles of Assessment--the data help accelerate scholar achievement and provide consistent extension measures over multiple years. The criterions align with state assessments, and to what extent well students do on MAP correlates with their performance forward the California Standards Test and the California High teach Exit Exam. They have meaning for bookish mans teachers and parents, and demonstrate high flats of validity and reliability.