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

2013年，国家研究理事会发布了一份报告，题为《监测成功的K-12 STEM教育的进展：一个国家在进步？》，该报告概述了14项指标以及创建一个监测全国STEM教育质量的系统所需的研究和开发。该项目的资助是为了响应亲爱的同事信要求在促进测量和评价方案的创新研究，重点是开发研究和工具，以提高国家的能力，以衡量这些指标。本项目的研究人员将探讨指标12 -国家使用评估来衡量科学和数学学科的核心概念和实践的情况。确定国家评估与国家采用的当前大学和职业准备标准的核心概念的一致性是一个复杂的过程，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50个州的学生评估系统政策。此外，该项目还将制定跨州标准，用于报告各州评估内容与各州采用的标准的一致性，以改进这种一致性的方法。在第一阶段，该项目将收集有关各州和两个国家联盟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，完善扩展数据库的在线过程，使其易于更新。在第三阶段，研究人员将与一部分国家科学和数学监督员合作，测试收集系统。在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、国家承包研究以及国家研究理事会科学评估委员会开展的工作建议的国家评估系统模型，开发确定国家评估和标准一致性的框架。

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.