August 2002 — Industry Perspective
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Producing Assessment-Savvy Educators
The biggest thing going for the education technology industry today is the push toward standards-based assessment. We have watched this gradual change since the late 1980s. Today, everybody is scrambling for ways to create, teach, assess and track the progress of students toward learning standards.
When it finally looked like schools were going to get serious about standards-based assessment, Excelsior Software quickly turned to vocational schools, which have been teaching and tracking standards for many years as a way of learning what works and what d'es not. Putting this technology into mainstream education, however, is a different game altogether. Without traditional grades, teachers have to redefine their jobs, parents fail to make the connection at all and students traditionally meet only minimum standards. The paradoxical question when providing technology tools to teachers has always been: "How do you make it simple enough to learn to use with minimal or no training, and still keep it functional enough to be worth the time to implement?"
Real-Time Information
A big issue has been getting teachers to use technology. Excelsior has always provided free software to anyone who teaches educators to use computers. Yet, for the last 15 years, we have seen few new teachers graduating from college with any knowledge of how to put together an assessment method for their curriculum and their classroom, let alone how to use a program designed to assist with this task. I am always shocked when student teachers are still required to turn in their paper gradebooks for evaluation.
We need to get the colleges of education to start producing assessment-savvy educators. Providing these skills after they enter the work force is expensive and time-consuming. Teaching young educators to create a spreadsheet d'es little to help them meet the plethora of data-tracking tasks, including multilevel grading, standards, discipline, attendance, regrading, anecdotal records and IEP requirements, which they will be required to do daily or in real time. And real time is where they need to be.
The latest computers and networks, as well as the Internet, have dictated that information be available in real time. The problem is you can't report in real time what you don't have. Teachers must participate, but getting them to do so is difficult. Gone is the need for quarters, semesters and other periods of grading, which were put in place to stop and assess where students were so changes could be implemented if needed. Yet, these are so ingrained in the mindset of schools that they won't go away easily. When assessment is in real time, i.e. day to day, then changes are as well. Schools know that, but they are stuck doing what they already know how to do. But the curious thing about real-time information is who wants to see it. The answer may surprise you.
Back in the early '90s Excelsior, IBM and Ameritech teamed up to provide home access to real-time student progress via teachers' gradebooks. Parents wanted to know how their kids were doing in school. Students used IBM PCs at school and at home with direct ISDN lines. The gradebook and home-viewing software was Excelsior's. The experiment was expensive, but Excelsior's Pinnacle System was based on valuable knowledge gleaned from that pilot installation near Chicago, Ill.
