SFUSD’s waiver
from certain requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, along with
the waivers of the other districts associated with the California Office for
Reform in Education (CORE), will dramatically change the measures used to
assess the outcomes for students and schools for accountability purposes.
According to CORE, “The districts have developed a consortium-wide
accountability framework, the School Quality Improvement System, which emphasizes
academic achievement, growth, and graduation rate, while also including
social-emotional factors and school culture and climate.”[1] Given
this context, many practitioners and researchers are starting to ask -- what
measures will this system use to assess students’ social-emotional factors?
CORE mentions
measures of students’ non-cognitive skills as a proxy for students’
social-emotional factors. Two projects
that Stanford University is working on with SFUSD use some measures of
non-cognitive skills that could be helpful when selecting and refining these
measures. I give short descriptions of
these projects below, and describe some aspects of the measures stemming from
these projects that could be helpful when assessing non-cognitive skills.
Mistakes and Mindsets: Professor Jo Boaler of the Stanford’s
Graduate School of Education and Professor Greg Walton of the Stanford
University Psychology Department head this study. It examines whether teachers’
and students’ mindsets can influence their interactions with mistakes in
mathematics, and therefore, a set of interventions that can potentially promote
mistakes as learning opportunities. More importantly for this discussion,
Boaler and Walton as working closely with the PERTS lab at Stanford which focuses
on programs attempting to change the way students think about schools as a
strategy for promoting increases in student achievement. Their programs are
delivered over the Internet, and for students, usually take 1-3 hours to
complete, or approximately two class sessions. Embedded in these programs are
measures of students’ mindsets. According to PERTS, “[r]esilient students have
adaptive mindsets about school. They think about school in ways that help them
stay motivated and engaged even when coursework is challenging.”[2]
These Internet based measures of a students mindset might be a cost-effective
measure of students’ social-emotional factors, especially if they are delivered
at the same time as the Smarter Balanced assessments on the computer. For example,
what if these measures of students’ mindsets could be integrated into the
administration of the academic assessments delivered on the computer?
Promoting Learning, Understanding,
Self-regulation (PLUS):
The Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids or the SPARK lab,
headed by Assistant Professor Jelena Obradovic in the Stanford Graduate School
of Education. It describes the PLUS study as examining how parts of the
elementary school classroom context affects development of executive functions
in students beyond kindergarten. Professor Obradovic is using certain measures
of executive function in this study as well as a measure for collecting data on
the classroom context itself. Obradovic defines executive function as “[s]tudents’
ability to focus attention, ignore distractions, and control their behavior” and
also points out that it has been linked to both “school readiness and
subsequent academic achievement.”[3] Obradovic’s
measure of executive function, may also be another appropriate assessment of
students’ non-cognitive skills. From
what I know the assessment is completed on a tablet through a computer program,
and involves an observation protocol.
To top it off,
both of these studies will help SFUSD and other districts across the country
understand whether certain factors in teacher instruction or certain factors in
a classroom context actually influence these non-cognitive skills. I think
these measures, if potentially delivered on the same computerized platform to
the Smarter Balanced assessments, could be both cost effective helpful in
providing a measure of students’ non-cognitive skills for the School Quality
Improvement System.
[1] Highlights of the joint Request for
Waivers under ESEA Section 9401 from Either Districts Participating in the
California Office to Reform Education (CORE). Retrieved
on Oct. 30, 2013 from http://coredistricts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Key-Points-from-the-School-Quality-Improvement-system.pdf
[2] PERTS Website. Retreived on Oct. 30,
2013 from http://www.perts.net/home/PERTS.php
[3] Stanford Project on Adaption and
Resilience in Kids website. “Promoting learning, understanding self-regulation
(PLUS) project.) retrieved on Oct. 30, 2013 from http://www.stanford.edu/group/sparklab/studies.html
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