Jeffrey Price Article #1 Summary 04/21114 Alternative-Assessment Groups Pursue Divergent Pathways The Smarter Balanced Group and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCH) are the ones who are mainly behind all assessments made for the classroom students. There are also two other organizations which are not very well known, and federally funded, which work on alternate assessments for students who have very severe disabilities; they make up one percent of the testing population.
These two groups are not even using the same strategies/theories of learning. One, The Dynamic Learning Maps, uses the multiple pathways for building any one skill, and tests students during the instructions; and the other, The National Center and State Collaborative, focuses more on the “bigger ideas” from the content of the common-core used for specific grade levels to evaluate them accordingly. The Dynamic Learning Maps Is supposed to be able to create an ;optimal map, or web, showing the many complex, Interconnected ways students learn.
Neal Kingston, the project director for DEL says it is called the Human Genome Project of education. It focuses on the pathways in which students find answers, so it pretty much looks at the underlying skills one has to figure out something in a deferent way than another person might do so. Currently 8 states use the DEL assessing. These tests range from three to five questions, and can last only from three to thirty minutes long. Students and teachers are more interactive throughout the entire year with this teeth.
Rachel Cognomen, a senior research fellow for the National Center on Educational Outcomes says that students with severe disabilities “are interested in the same concepts and activities as their grade-level peers are; they Just access them differently. ” She goes on to say that they try to stick to the common-core language, but break It Into pieces to let Instructors see how each area works together to form one concept.
