Measuring Student Success in a One-‐to-‐One Learning Environment
First, recognizing traditional academic expectations from teachers, parents and the educational community, we will continue to look at achievement tests scores as a benchmark for evaluating individual and group academic progress. With Madison Academy’s adoption last school year of a partnership with Northwest Evaluation Association (www.nwea.org) and their computerized adaptive achievement testing format, we now have more data descriptive of individual and group achievement. Furthermore, NWEA enables a functional process for on-‐going formative assessment during the school year as well as end-‐of-‐the year summative assessment. Additionally, since we are a college preparatory Christian day school, student performance will continue to be tracked through performance on college entrance exams and their preliminary forms (ACT, PLAN, Explore, SAT, PSAT). Advanced Placement test results also provide informative data. Over time, these quantitative measures serve as a resource to help answer the question, “Is this technology initiative making a difference in learning?”
That said, to expect traditional quantitative reviews to be the sole measure of academic progress in a 21st century learning environment is near-‐sighted. To use a Biblical metaphor, one cannot put new wine in old wineskins. Traditional assessment is marked by standardized conditions, individual performance, and secrecy regarding narrow indicators of factual learning: all characteristics that are inconsistent with measuring the additional skills of understanding, exploration, creativity, and collaboration that mark learning and work environments focused on 21st century skills. Assessment must evaluate and encourage students (and teachers) to move along a continuum from doing old things in old ways to doing old things in new ways to the goal of doing new things in new ways.
To guide this assessment process at Madison Academy, we are using the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) developed by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology. With its second generation introduced earlier this year, TIM provides a structure for the administration to qualitatively evaluate the level of technology integration in the classrooms and its resources provide teachers with models of meaningful instructional integration of technology. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments (active, constructive, goal directed, authentic, and collaborative) and associates five levels of technology integration (entry, adoption, adaption, infusion, and transformation). [An interactive version of this matrix can be found at http://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/matric.php.] Furthermore, the Florida Center for Instructional Technology has fleshed out this 25-‐box matrix with grade-‐level illustrative applications to the curricular areas of math, science, social studies and language arts. Use of this matrix is being further supplemented by a Technology Integration Matrix Observation Tool (TIM-‐O) providing a framework for administrators to document progress/results and a Technology Comfort Measure (TCM) for teachers to use as part of their own self-‐evaluation. Both of these resources are to be released in Spring 2012.
Finally, we are beginning to utilize student and teacher digital portfolios to document this quantitative and qualitative process and results. Review and adjustment with purposefully sought feedback from each academic department is a regular part of our on-‐going professional development.