National CASAS Consortium Content Standards
Iowa Pilot Update
On December 14, Iowa's John Hartwig and Sally Schroeder convened a meeting
of the Iowa Content Standards Advisory Council to continue exploring how
to develop successful instructional strategies, user-friendly content
standards documents and effective staff development models to assist the
National CASAS Consortium states as they begin to implement content standards.
The specific purpose of the December meeting was to formalize a strategy
for piloting a variety of tools produced by CASAS to assist teachers implement
content standards. Jim Harrison, CASAS Senior Research Associate, presented
a new, unique coding system for content standards and a newly-developed
categorical system for clustering similar content standards. He also demonstrated
some draft documents developed by CASAS to help teachers determine the
basic skills content standards embedded in CASAS competencies.
CASAS has identified the underlying basic skills content standards for
each competency measured on the Life and Work Series (Form 83R). This
was done to illustrate the basic skills that could be targeted in teaching
each competency measured on this test. Jim presented this "targeted"
approach to the Advisory Council to determine if this approach should
be pursued.
Iowa's Barb Rolston illustrated a method for targeting priority competencies
using Class Performance by Competency TOPSpro reports. Another phase of
this piloting effort will explore the feasibility of automating content
standards aspects of CASAS tests and other relevant materials.
Lastly, Jim demonstrated a multi-level lesson plan addressing the content
standards embedded in the same CASAS competency (4.2.1--Interpret wages,
wage deductions, benefits, and timekeeping forms). This was presented
in an effort to address earlier concerns about the complexity of developing
lesson-plans for multi-level classes.
The Iowa Content Standards Advisory council has agreed to pilot test
in 3 different areas. One Group will field test the Life and Work Reading
test (83R) to determine if this more targeted approach is helpful to teachers.
Another Group will identify priority competencies for a specific instructional
level and will use a CASAS-developed inventory to identify the relevant
basic skills in areas of deficiency. A third group will review all of
the materials produced by CASAS to date for format, ease of use, the effectiveness
of the category and coding systems, etc.
This pilot testing will begin by mid-January and final site reports will
be due on May 15. Findings of the Advisory Council will be presented to
the National CASAS Consortium in June 2005.
On behalf of the National CASAS Consortium, CASAS is grateful to its
Iowa colleagues for its invaluable assistance in its field-testing and
piloting efforts relative to content standards.
J. R. Harrison
CASAS
Senior Research Associate
Strategic Planning, Policy and Implementation
(203) 453-5459
jharrison@casas.org
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