Developing a System for Tracking State Assessment Policies in Science and Mathematics Education

2013年，国家研究委员会发布了一份报告《监控K-12 STEM教育成功的进展：一个进步的国家？》，其中概述了14项指标以及创建一个监测国家STEM教育质量的系统所需的研发。本项目是应亲爱的同事来信的要求而资助的，该信要求对促进测量和评估创新计划进行研究，该计划专注于开发研究和工具，以提高国家衡量这些指标的能力。该项目的研究人员将讨论指标12--各国使用评估来衡量科学和数学学科的核心概念和做法的情况。确定各州评估与各州采用的当前大学和职业准备标准中的核心概念是否一致是一个复杂的过程，需要协调国家政策和评估实践。该项目将设计和测试一种在线方法，并开发一个数据库，用于跟踪和报告与50个州的学生评估系统有关的政策。此外，该项目将制定跨州标准，以报告国家评估内容与国家通过的标准的一致性，以改进这种一致性的方法。研究活动将分三个阶段进行。在第一阶段，该项目将收集关于各州和两个国家联合体评估政策的现有信息，以开发现有政策文件数据库，并构建在线信息收集门户。在第二阶段，研究人员将与专家顾问合作，完善扩大数据库的在线流程，使其易于更新。在第三阶段，研究人员将与州科学和数学监督员的子集合作，测试收集系统。与开发国家评估政策报告系统的同时，将根据两个评估联盟的工作、国家签约研究以及国家研究理事会科学评估委员会开展的工作所建议的国家评估系统模式，制定框架以确定国家评估和标准的一致性。

The National Research Council in 2013 released the report Monitoring Progress toward Successful K-12 STEM Education: A Nation Advancing?, which outlined 14 Indicators as well as the needed research and development to create a system to monitor the quality of STEM education in the nation. This project is funded in response to a Dear Colleague Letter request for research in the Promoting Innovation in Measurement and Evaluation program focused on developing research and tools to advance the nation's capability to measure these indicators. The researchers in this project will address Indicator 12 - States' use of assessments that measure the core concepts and practices of science and mathematics disciplines. Determining the alignment of state assessments with the core concepts in the current college and career readiness standards adopted by states is a complex process that requires coordination of state policy and assessment practices. This project will design and test an online method and develop a database for tracking and reporting on policies regarding student assessment systems of the 50 states. In addition, the project will develop cross-state criteria for reporting on the content alignment of state assessments to state-adopted standards to improve methodologies for such alignment.Research activities will be carried out in three phases. In phase one, the project will gather available information about assessment policies of the states and the two national consortia to develop the database of existing policy documents and to structure the online information gathering portal. In the second stage, the researchers will work with expert advisors to refine the online process for expanding the database to make it easily updatable. In the third phase the researchers will work with a subset of state science and mathematics supervisors to test out the collection system. Parallel to the development of the system to report state assessment policies will be the development of frameworks for determining the alignment of state assessments and standards based on the work of the two assessment consortia, state-contracted studies, and the models of state assessments systems recommended by work conducted by the National Research Council science assessment committee.