EL Assessment Pilot Project - First Year Report

Marilyn Fehn, Kirkwood Community College

July 23, 2001

Four Iowa ABE/ EL programs were selected to take part in the EL assessment pilot project. These programs and their coordinators are: Jim Schneider, Eastern Iowa Community College District, Mary Entz, Des Moines Area Community College, Christine Case, Western Iowa Tech Community College, and Angela Oriano-Darnall, Southeastern Community College. The purpose of the pilot project is to ascertain how best to put effective, standardized EL student assessment in place throughout the state. The pilot project will also determine what barriers to success may need to be resolved prior to all other Iowa EL programs beginning to implement standardized EL student assessment.

The pilot project is being coordinated by Marilyn Fehn, an EL instructor for Kirkwood Community College, who is also becoming Iowa's state certified trainer for CASAS assessment. The pilot project group also includes two CASAS staff members, Linda Taylor and Ingrid Greenberg. A good partnership has been established between the Iowa pilot project group and the CASAS team; they in turn have become familiar with Iowa's specific assessment needs and issues.

The first year of the pilot project has allowed the pilot project group to lay down a foundation of cooperation, agree on the structure and format of the pilot project, and to gain more specific knowledge of EL CASAS assessments via teleconferencing with the CASAS team. From this first phase of knowledge gathering and building understanding, the pilot project is now moving toward the next, more active phase of the project.

The next phase of the pilot project starts July 25, 2001, when the pilot project coordinators and their selected staff will attend all day training in CASAS EL Life Skills assessments. Once trained in administration of these assessments, the four coordinators and their staff will begin implementing the assessments in September 2001 in selected El classes at each pilot project site. Some sites will implement in phases, and some will put full implementation into place at once.

During this first year of implementation, the pilot sites will track any specific concerns that arise which they feel may be barriers to eventual statewide implementation. Through the pilot project groups in depth discussions this past year, some specific needs, issues, and challenges to success have already been identified. The hope is that by anticipating problems early on in the pilot project, the group will be better able to resolve them, and also make subsequent suggestions for tailoring assessments to meet Iowa's specific needs, or modifying programming, if needed. In other words, solutions will need to be thought about not only after, but also throughout implementation of the pilot project so that assessment can be effective and successful.

The following is a listing of the anticipated issues and modifications referred to above:

1. Possible modification of intake and orientation processes in order to accommodate new assessments.

2. Issues of open entry/open exit programming.

3. Issues of leveling; i.e. inaccurate match up between existing class levels and CASAS Skill Level Descriptors.

4. Need for paired data to fulfill accountability needs, i.e. demonstrated learner gains. The CASAS team has provided data from California which indicates that out of all students tested, approximately 35.3% provide paired data, which in turn provides a measure of learner gains from pre test to post test. The California data also shows that even this modest 35.3% cannot be gained in the first few years of implementation of standardized assessment.

5. Issues of limited staff, and limited staff time and pay need to be addressed as implementing and continuing comprehensive assessments will undoubtedly require more time and expertise from Iowa's EL instructors and support staff.

6. Need for instruction and curriculum support for EL instructors so that they understand and know how to provide competency-based instruction to their students, which is the key to CASAS assessment. Testing and teaching must be matched, and comprehensive in nature, in order to obtain the learner gains that standardized assessment is meant to document.

Each pilot project site will have the capability to come up with its own action plan in order to deal with its own specific implementation issues. In this way, the logistics of testing times and dates, delivery and pick up of testing materials, and leveling of classes, for example, can be worked out locally so that each site has a streamlined and effective assessment system in place.

One modification in the CASAS assessment will most likely be utilized at each pilot site. For those students who will be appraised using the Life Skills Form 20 Appraisal, only the reading section will be used. In place of the listening section of Appraisal Form 20, the pre test Listening 53 will be used. This will provide a short step without losing valuable information, according to our CASAS team. Both students' listening and reading capabilities, for placement purposes, will be appraised in this fashion, but by using this wide range listening pre test, teachers will also have a head start on pre testing at the start of classes. Thus, teachers will have only the reading pretest to administer at the first of semester. Both reading and listening post tests can then be administered after the requisite number of class hours, and paired data obtained.

The members of the pilot project feel that the introduction of comprehensive assessment into Iowa's existing EL programs will be uniquely challenging. Incorporating standardized assessments into systems where there has been little or no assessment, the possibility of managed enrollment programs, and learning how to teach competency based education, to name a few, will require a great deal of flexibility and teaching strength from Iowa's EL instructors. Many instructors teach part time and off site, and are not usually part of a teaching team in a fully equipped learning center as many ABE/GED instructors are. The challenges the current EL education system and its instructors pose for the pilot project, as well as the rest of the state later, are the following: providing good communication, helping resolve the logistical issues of administering comprehensive testing, and receiving ongoing support and instructional development from area coordinators and the state Department of Education. However, even with significant challenges to resolve, the EL pilot project group feels the CASAS EL assessments will prove to be strong and valid testing tools and are looking forward to launching assessment in the fall.

July 26, 2001