Workshops
Pathways provides training and workshops to better support the use of data in school improvement. We can also work with your staff to develop standards-based items and assessments aligned with curriculum. We can help schools develop assessments and use their data at the classroom, department, school, and district levels.
Check out our Professional Development for more information.
Performance Assessments
Overview
Pathways' performance assessment solutions provide schools with assessments that measure critical 21st Century skills. We provide Folio™ hand-scored writing assessments as well as PEG™ (Project Essay Grade), a reliable scoring software program for automated on-line essay scoring. Pathways Learning Group has partnered up with Measurement Inc. to provide the most experienced writing assessment program to increase student writing proficiency.
Performance assessments are in line with this approach and measure a student's completion of a task. Anytime students must respond, in contrast to selecting a response, students are "constructing" or "performing." This means that student responses are more like those in real life. Technology has come a long way in supporting teachers in evaluating and reporting the student results from performance tasks.
Working with our partners, Pathways can provide you with a variety of support in using performance assessments. Your school has the options to:
- Administer Performance Assessments in any of the following Assessment Models: Summative (Score), Benchmark (Content Knowledge) and Interim or Formative Classroom (Monitoring Progress)
- Use the most typical performance assessment, a written essay, or use content-specific constructed-response items in English language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, and other content areas based on your standards.
- Handle a large volume of student responses as well as the flexibility to apply customized scoring criteria for each assessment.
- Provide schools with a variety of data types, building a comprehensive assessment system.
- Reduce errors in having written performance tasks by an external evaluator.
- Score assessments both by trained scorers or online with scoring software which is based on 40 years of research by a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics, modeling the decisions of professional readers.
- Receive near instantaneous results using online scoring so that teachers can use the data, change instruction, and meet student needs.
The U.S. Department of Education is currently promoting the use of assessments that elicit complex student demonstrations or applications of what was learned. In order to be ready for the 21st century workplace, students are expected to master "a common set of college-and career-ready" academic standards. College readiness is currently defined as the ability to pass entry-level, credit-bearing, college courses without remediation. Career ready skills include both academic and "employability" skills such as adaptability, collaboration, critical thinking, and field specific "technical skills. Clearly, different types of assessments are needed to measure these skills. (Education Week, April 21, 2010 Vol 29, NO. 29).
Contact Pathways for more information on our performance assessment services at sales@pathwayslearninggroup.com