CAG Conference on assessment

CAG conference on Assessment; Saturday 10/20/07 Rancho Cordova, CA

Notes on the sessions:

This blog entry includes my notes from the California Association for the Gifted conference on Assessment with Dr. Sandra Kaplan. This conference focused on specific areas within the GATE standards.

Opener: Marilyn Lane
GATE standards
Section 1 Program Design
Section 2 Identification
Section 3 Curriculum and Instruction
Section 4 Social and Emotional Development
Section 5 Professional Development
Section 6 Parent and Community Development
Section 7 Program Assessment

The specific standards within each section listed above can be found at the CAG website.
http://www.cagifted.ord/

A good place to discuss differentiation is in your department meetings. Teachers are already differentiating for below basic students, we now need to add in what we can do to tweak a curriculum for those who are above the average without adding more work.

Dr. Kaplan notes:
Looking at the idea of evaluation across the last 50 years… Many of he skills that we are trying to teach, such as critical thinking are skills that take a lifetime to master, thus they are hard to evaluate.
Testing procedures for many skill sets are already in place, so how do you add an evaluation without adding an evaluation. State tests don’t necessarily measure what we are teaching gifted students. Saying that a good measure is for gifted students to perform high on state tests is not accurate because we are not necessarily interested in measuring their factual knowledge.

How do you measure someone’s ability to be productive or to get better at decoding thoughts and ideas? How do you measure ones ability to think?

Texas has spent about 55 million dollars developing what they call performance standards for gifted students.
They have created benchmarks for grades 4,8,12 for where they anticipate a gifted student will be. They are getting ready to implement. Dr. Kaplan feels that these standards are only good for advocacy. We often use survey data (qualitative data)- which measures their overall happiness. We also see high reading scores- but that is not a reflection of a gifted program, as those kids would probably be reading at that level anyway.
What is a challenge?
Many students don’t have a clear understanding of what that is.
A real challenge: potential transmitted (manifested) into performance
What needs to be provided to help transmit potential into performance? How do you assess performance?

Contributing VS Contributors

What is an accomplishment? How do we define it?
Objective v. subjective?
Defined by..
Me?
You?
The world?

All measures should help a person understand who they are and what their accomplishments are or will be.
What are the things people do to be successful and what are the problems that hinder success?
Assessment should be affective, and help us understand what it means to us.

I don’t necessarily care that you get to the end point, I care about what you are doing along the way to get to where you are going.

The end point is the examples of good work and accomplishment, but the process is what helps us to understand who we are.

Dependency on their teachers to evaluate them and tell them what to do is not helping them develop into autonomous thinking people. Many students get angry when you say “I don’t know, lets look at the criteria and you tell me whether you are doing enough”…

“Is this the answer you are looking for”- Students want specifics and want to give the teacher what THEY want, not what they think. They need to take control of their learning process.

The students’ own evaluation and awareness of where they are and where they have weaknesses is the most important.

We should be preparing students for AP in kindergarten. Determine relevance, understanding the nature of the piece, summarize, drawing conclusions, deep understanding of how to cite examples that give authenticity to your arguments. Understand how to present an argument, language patterns and construction patterns of different ways of writing.

How do students decode what is in a message (prompt) and understand how to thoughtfully respond.
Test preparation
For good Performance students need to understand what we want:
Thinking: inductive or deductive?
Concrete to abstract or the other way round?

Students should automatically be thinking in clusters.Example: discuss the nature of love as seen in this story. – The student should automatically be looking at all aspects.

There is a difference between performance for today and performance for a lifetime.

Readiness:
Just because a person is gifted doesn’t mean that they are prepared. We need to be clear about what we want as outcomes, then we need to map backwards to figure out what skills they need to get there.

In handouts:
Rubric:
Acceleration
Depth
Complexity
Novelty

To determine the relevance is to take on the task of determining why something is important, to find evidence, authenticate and substantiate what you have learned.

What is the relevance of ________ in relationship to ___________
Event : today
Author : genre
Etc.
If we say “how do you know ____is good”, what criteria would you use to decide?
If Abraham Lincoln is judged to be a here, What criteria is being used to decide then, and what is being used now? How are they different?
We are not talking about the practice of the skill void of content. It is the relevance of the material in a wide spectrum of application
How do you read something, digest something, interact with something with a critical eye, not criticizing.

Assessment has an intimidation factor.

Vulnerability:

Student:
What if I fail?
Parent:
Get the kid out because parents can't keep up- loss of face
Teacher:
When students don’t perform the teacher suffers (mentally)
Administrator:
The school will look bad- pressure from the DO

If we are trying to get students to be self aware- to know if they are at a point of mastery, or where they are on the road.

Teachers often express frustration because they would like to do X with their students, and things like NCLB require them to do Y in the classroom. For many districts the test is becoming an end point in determining progress, instead of mastery of the thought process.

The intent for gifted education is the idea that tests are a means to an end not the end itself. Yes, you can get high grades; this doesn’t mean that you can perform well in your chosen field. Performance is the final assessment. Tests are meant to be used as measures only.

Intellectual Humility;
If you don’t have a clear understanding of how you are doing you will never understand your giftedness. Students need to understand that they are not great at everything, and be able to value and understand where they fall on a continuum of learning.

Learning to be accomplished.

Digging into information:
Looking deeper into things that capture your attention. Not the same as checking it out, or adding information to what you already know.

What it is… What the icon looks like…
Check it out Check Mark
The point .
Dig into Shovel
Point of view Glasses
Question ?
Frame/save Picture frame or piggy bank
Add to/incomplete +
Communicate Pencil

Checking it out means that it is unclear- add for understanding
Questioning refers to a new area of exploration
Teachers can replace icons with different icons that have ore meaning in your schema.

Icons are good for site analysis (on the web)
Reading for meaning.

Right Edge thinking:
On one edge:
Art of Argumentation

The evidence seems to indicate that…
Another way to perceive this would be…
What if…

On the other edge:
Logical Thought

Relate
Inductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning


Right angle thinking is the intersection of what \’s going on with other ideas.
Absorbing, comprehending, listening in ways that cause you to think, question, look for more information.

When elaborating on information...
Building a Knowledge Hierarchy

Build Down:
Take an idea and be able to:
Elaborate
Apply: look at today
Defend: look at the argument about why this is really important

Build Up:
Take an idea and be able to:
Research
Take in a different directionExtend

Build up and down:
Take an idea and be able to:
Choose what direction to take

On the ruler, each side is important for the student, but it is where the two sides intersect that holds the meaning for them. This is right angle thinking.

Substantiate
Authenticate
Verify

Students need to practice prioritizing, from least important to most important.
Relate to the big idea
Look at the overall repetition of ideas
Look at the purpose of the work
Think about personal values

Higher levels of knowing, not necessarily higher levels of thinking.


When determining relevance, copy a page of text and have students use scissors to literally cut out the main points, discuss.
Or, give them a page of text and have them cross out all of the words that they think are not important. Repeat, and repeat until they get down to the main point. Then ask them how to get there quicker.


Summarizing:
Glue: A universal concept
Change
Systems
Power
Relationships, etc.

Use as a way to unite ideas.

We are telling students that on one hand they aren’t good learners if they can’t regurgitate the information given to them and on the other hand we are telling them that they are not a good learner if they can’t think about all of the other ways to see it.

We want to get them to ask the question, “why does this make sense?”

What is the role of a professional student?
In this classroom…
You have the right to challenge ideas appropriately- politely.
GATE students get into a rut of being the first to raise their hand go tell us what the “right” answer is, and then sit back to look at the rest of the class with disdain.
We recognize individual differences.
Research reports that if you don’t have an environment that allows differences, the kids start to conquer and divide. Put things up that are done DIFFERENTLY.
In this classroom what we really prize most is your ability to try and your ability to improve.
Equal opportunity is not the same as the same opportunity.

There are times when…
I have control
You choose
You work alone
We work together

What we teach the kids cognitively HAS to have an affective component.
Making connections.

Use sheets to show the structural representation of what we are asking them to do. They show the thinking that we are trying to reinforce.
How does one determine relevance in a comparative base?

With reagard to the rubric driven lesson:
The most important part is in the beginning, when you address the reason “why”
Students should be able to ask the question “why are we doing this?”

Why is their behavior the way it is?
In the Rubric Related Lesson Plan presented by Dr. Kaplan:
The whole to parts section is where students are learning what to look for and what to listen for,

In the integration section:
Look at a single subject in depth and work on retrieval

Application: interdisciplinarity

This model has been built on:

Characteristics of gifted children
Pedagogy
GATE Standards

The lesson plan is open ended and can be used with all aspects of student learning.

Judging with Criteria:
We are really asking kids to become decision makers, a process that is usually difficult for them.
An intellectual responsibility goes into the decision making process. It is the fact that a person had better make sure that they understand what they are committing to.
Research by Renzulli as well as Maslow-
The concept of commitment to task is germain. Students need to understand their choices and commit to them. The concept is that you’ve done the best judgement that you can based upon your commitment.

Criteria can change in terms of:
Availability
Function/purpose
Rationale
Value

Example:
Former Olympic swimmer stated that if she were a swimmer in today’s world she would not be invited to the Olympics. This is because the availability of things to use in training has changed, the purpose of the sport has changed, the value of the sport has changed, etc.

Students need to learn to:
Judge _______by looking at/thinking about criteria within its own discipline

When judging in a comparative base:
Compare __________to ___________ using these criteria (solidify what they are by survey of the group)- how can they justify or agree upon criteria? Conventional wisdom, reference points such as the California state standards, etc.

Criteria is the wedge for judging.
What is judging like in the real world?
Becoming critical as a consequence of judging with criteria
What is the difference between subjective and objective?
Different times give different values to the same thing.
Context- the concept of time, the concept of place, the concept of philosophy

Development of a critical eye-
Example:
Look at a review of the author’s philosophy as related to the body of an author’s work. Is there congruence?

There are multiple critical eyes that see the same thing – they may all see it differently. What is that makes them see things differently?

What is the difference between a critic and a potter?
You shape things in the way that you perceive them.

Things like:
gender
work
knowledge
skill
all affect how we see things.

Helping kids understand the nature of bias and the nature of prejudice. Students cannot understand the role of being critical until they understand the role of the self.

“I just do” how much is that a help or a hindrance in making judgments?

It’s one thing to be critical and another to be a critic.

Closing:
You have to be very careful that you don’t misunderstand the fact that giftedness doesnot transcend humanness. They still need significant instruction.

We want students to know:
Ideas are related to each other
Built upon each other
What we are really doing is making judgments with criteria and determining relevance
These skills give greater depth of understanding and higher levels of knowing.

Thanks CAG and Dr. Kaplan!