Assessment and Planning: Giving Students Ownership

Amy Gluckman, Jeff Ritter, Anne Mullen and Kathy Lento

J ust A Start is a comprehensive community service organization. Each part of Just A Start has an educational component. One Stop is for out-of-school young people, aged 16- 21, who are interested in job readiness, carpentry and painting skills training, and education. Futures for Young Parents involves pregnant and parenting teens in GED preparation and career exploration. The Evening School meets three nights a week and is open to all adults in the community who want to work toward taking their GED tests. Each of these programs strives toward having individualized learning programs and a student-centered curriculum.

Many of our students are not ready to begin G ED preparation. These students are placed in pre-G ED classes, and it will be many months or perhaps years before they will be able to pass the GED. For this reason, last year we began to explore ways in which these students could see how they were making progress toward their long-term goal, and how they were accomplishing short-term goals. We began looking at various instruments that would allow the students to set their own goals and become the planners and owners of their accomplishments. Teachers would provide the tools, but the students would be responsible for using them in a way that best met their needs. Both teachers and students would gain some freedom from complete reliance on the standardized testing required by our funders.

The development process took many months. SABES provided descriptions of the student-centered goal setting and assessment procedures that other Massachusetts programs had developed, along with copies of the instruments they had created. Using these as a model, we developed an intake and ongoing assessment process that would be more student-centered than our current approach.

The Process

The assessment procedure we developed includes an extensive intake process along with periodic review of individual student's goals and progress in one-on-one meetings.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Intake Assessment: Some of our programs are open-entry/open-exit while others have definite cycles. In either case, the teacher and the new student sit down together and fill out the Intake Registration fonn. (see Fig. 1-2) This form asks students to rate their own skills in reading, writing, and math. It also asks about their educational history. Next, students are asked to write a paragraph on any topic to give the teacher an idea of the student's skill in writing and to provide a sample to which later writings can be compared.

Within the first week of class, the students fill out the Student Learning Goals fonn. (see Fig. 3 and Appendix 7) This eight-page form
lists a wide range of skills, subjects and practical activities that students might want to do or learn. Finally, new students take a standardized test; over the past year we have used both the SRA and the TABE.
Once the student has been in class for two or three weeks, the student and teacher have a meeting. At this time, we look over the student's goals, interests, test results, and any other information. Together, we make a plan for the next eight to twelve weeks using the Educational Goals Plan and Progress Record. (see Fig. 4 and Appendix 8) The Goals Plan describes what each student will be working on over the next few months and where each hopes to be at the end of that time.

Ongoing Assessment: As students continue in class, the teacher and the students use the information on the Goals Plan to develop weekly or biweekly assignment sheets which are kept in the students' notebooks. In order to keep track of the work students have done, they fill out the daily log' at the end of each day; students keep these logs in their notebooks as well. Then, after two or three months in the class, the teacher meets with students individually. At this meeting, the Goals Plan is reviewed and updated, and a new plan for the next period is written. The purpose of these periodic meetings is to give students an opportunity to appreciate what they have accomplished, to discuss any problems that the student or the teacher may be having, and to plan goals and work for the next few months (see Fig. 5 and Appendix 9).

Looking Back

This description of the assessment process we developed summarizes what we planned to do more accurately than what we actually did. In practice, different teachers have found different parts of the assessment plan to be more or less useful and more or less feasible. Below, three of the teachers discuss their experiences with the process and how the tools worked in practice.

JEFF: The One Stop Program

My overall experience with the assessment methods we developed at Just A Start has been positive. The Daily Log has been a great help. I can see the students' amazement at how much work they have done in a day. They also express some dismay if they realize that they have not produced much. The Student Learning Goals is always helpful as a reference for both me and the students when they need to reignite their motivation or remind themselves of something they committed to earlier. The weekly Assignment Sheets have been the least useful. The week is really an unknown quantity on a Monday and there is no reason to expect or want everything on a lesson plan to get accomplished. Most weeks, something unexpected occurs that precludes finishing the assignments. Spontaneous lessons usually turn out to be better learning expenences.

FIGURE 3

FIGURE 4

KATHY: The Futures for Young Parents Program

Of all the materials generated by this project, I found the Student Learning Goals list to be the least helpful. The form itself is confusing; it is long and a bit repetitive. The students are not always sure how to respond and don't feel it is helpful either. I would like for us to develop something shorter, that is filled out with the student. I think the Daily Log has the potential to work well and be useful for many things. The problem is in reminding the students to fill it out and in giving them feedback on what they have written. The Weekly Assignment Sheet is good, although it could be more closely connected to the daily log. We are trying to devise a system where the sheets are more accessible to teachers so that they are actually filled out in a timely way. The Goals Plan works the best. It takes a long time for students to really feel that they want to be involved in setting goals for themselves.

FIGURE 5

AMY: The Futures for Young Parents Program

Overall, I think that the process of thinking about setting and assessing goals in a student-centered way has been helpful to me as a
teacher. Ironically, it has probably forced me to acknowledge that I don't believe as completely in a student-centered approach as I might have thought, that there are some things that I want the students to learn and some goals that I want them to have whatever they think about it!

The process and instruments. that we are now (trying to) use have, I think been helpful to the students although it is hard always to know how and how much. The Goals Plan along with the one-on-one meetings at which it is filled out is the most important to my mind. We have had a hard time scheduling these one- on-one meetingst so they have not been held as regularly as we planned. (We are planning to build time slots for them into our 1992-93 schedule.) Still, when a student seemed to feel discouraged about progress, pulling out the Goals Plan and reviewing it was a perfect thing to do. Listing everything that the student had accomplished in the previous two or three months helped the student feel better about being in schoolt and planning out the next few months made the path toward getting a GED seem finite.

The Daily Log is also helpful primarily in helping the students stay in touch with what they are doing. When I first started using the logst there was a noticeable drop in the number of students who came in .every day with a spaced-out look on their faces saying, "Now what am I working on in here?"

The Student Learning Goals list has not.been very helpful. The Futures students don't seem to like it and they rarely check off anything on it. I believe it could be improved by cutting down the number of skills and topics and adding some more light-hearted ones. I also think that many of the students honestly do not feel themselves to be interested in anything that one could learn about in school and may not until they get older or their interest is somehow sparked by the teacher.

The Process Continues

The process we began last year will con- tinue for a long time. As the months go by I we focus more on some of the questions that were left out of our initial discussions: How do we manage the logistics of using the forms and hold individual meetings? How do we adapt learner- centered assessment ideas developed through working with adults to the young people we serve? These questions will no doubt lead us to reassess and change our approach in the future.

Note
1. Adapted from Germanoski, M. -The Education Goals Assessment Packet,. Adventures in Assessment Vol. I. 0. 33.36.

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 3 (April 1992),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.