posted by:
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Maren Reeder
on May 3, 1999
at 5:16PM
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subject:
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Who we are, etc.
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My name is Maren Reeder and I work at the Merck Institute for Science Education. Established in 1993, the Institute has formed partnerships with four school districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania with the goal of improving student performance and participation in science in grades K-8. We work with teachers, administrators, parents, and the community to support standards-based teaching and learning.
A major component of our work is professional development programs for teachers within our partnership districts. Our evaluators, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), have been collecting data in the form of teacher surveys, observations, interviews, and student performance on the open-ended science portion of the SAT9 in grades 5 and 7. This past year CPRE started to correlate the amount of professional development a teacher has had to his/her students' performance on the SAT9.
Our major work in assessment has been a three-year project with Ted Chittenden at ETS. The Assessment Project had its roots in the Partnership's Leader Teacher Institute, a professional development program designed to deepen teachers' science knowledge, strengthen their teaching practice and build their leadership skills. Interests in assessment practices aligned with standards-based teaching strategies led to the project's plans to explore alternatives and to develop classroom-based strategies. The project was intended as a professional development opportunity for participating teachers, through their involvement in developing and evaluating assessment methods in science and mathematics. This work has produced binders of informal assessment tasks that are currently shared across the four districts.
In addition, we have been working with our partnership districts to develop a Partnership-wide assessment plan with the goal of providing a more comprehensive picture of student performance in science.
As far as questions, we have also struggled with how to assess both concepts and process skills (Mack McCary's message). In addition, we are struggling with trying to determine what each assesment instrument is really measuring and what it really tells us about teaching and learning and the quality of the science program.
Maren K. Reeder Merck Institute for Science Education
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