Saturday, June 7, 2008

Standards

The readings for this week delineated a holistic picture of the standards and assessment for American education.

First, I was astounded by “a sea of standards” in this nation – 200 separate standards with 3,093 benchmarks (McREL, 1998) – way too many standards became a growing problem facing American educators. Apparently, there are two primary options for educators to meet the requirements of the various standards documents— increase the amount of instructional time or decrease the number of standards that must be addressed.

Speaking of decreasing the number, a key to narrowing the focus of standards and thereby adding value to them is to develop power standards that feature endurance, leverage, and readiness for the next level of learning. These three criteria enable power standards to give students skills or knowledge that have broad applicability and remains with them long, and help them get ready for the next learning level. Moreover, as perfect curriculum coverage never happens, power standards help educators to choose coverage by default or by design wisely. In order to establish power standards, the leaders must make time for teachers to collaborate within and among grade levels to identify these standards, and create a framework that includes the most important standards along with clear definitions which encourage and value teacher creativity.

When standards are established, the performance task and assessment should be developed in the following process— Reflect about the students and the standard, consider the purposes of the assessment, brainstorm the performance tasks that might be used then make a preliminary evaluation of the result, develop a scenario for the performance task and the assessment-driven instruction, evaluate the first draft of the performance task and revise accordingly, develop criteria and rubrics for evaluating student performance, systematize all these decisions using a standard format, and finally, have the materials evaluated by other professionals and other students.

I also noticed that one important requirement for educators to accomplish the evaluating task is a thorough understanding of the three key terms—Criteria, standard, and rubric. Based on this understanding, educators develop criteria and rubrics that facilitate quality student performance and valid evaluation process.

Readings:

Marzano, R. J., & Kendal, J. S. (1998). Awash in a sea of standards. McREL.

Reeves, D. R. (2002). The leader's guide to standards. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

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