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Education faculty have developed assessment tools that local school districts are using to test stduent retention of science knowledge.

By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University Communications
November 13, 2007

One challenge standardized exams can present is the wait time students, families and educators must endure in order to find out how the test takers performed.

But several local school districts are working to bypass that problem.

“They approached us for help. It was something they wanted to do,” said Bruce Johnson, teacher and teacher education department head at The Univresity of Arizona, who worked on the project with a graduate student and other UA faculty.

It began last year after the Tucson Unified School District sought the UA's advice on ways to test how well students were retaining knowledge in the life, physical, earth and space sciences.

“The idea was that TUSD wanted to be able to measure student learning in science, and they wanted to tie it to the specific units they were teaching,” Johnson said.

Eventually, the “Development of Science Unit Assessments Aligned to School Curriculum and the Arizona Science Standard” project was launched to study ways teachers were evaluating their 2nd- through 8th-grade students in science.

Johnson will be presenting the project and the group's findings during a Nov. 14 forum.

In the project’s pilot phase, which began during the summer of 2006, more than 20,000 TUSD students were tested, Johnson said.

Such efforts are becoming increasingly important given national attention to science education.

Also, Arizona educators and others are currently trying to figure out ways to adequately measure how students preparing for Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, known as AIMS, exam grasp scientific knowledge.The AIMS science exam was put into place this year for several grade levels.

The group, which included UA College of Education faculty and one graduate student, worked with TUSD teachers and science coordinators to develop ways to test students at each level before and after they taught the science units.

TUSD has implemented the assessment tools and now Sunnyside Unified School District and Flowing Wells Unified School District officials are determining ways to apply the suggestions to their classrooms.

One other unique feature about the UA’s collaborative work with TUSD is how the project was funded. TUSD offered $10,000 to fund the project and the UA, with funds from the Pima Education Research Collaborative, put forward $20,000.The Collaborative provides funding for research and service-oriented partnerships between the UA’s College of Education, Pima County schools and Pima Community College.

What the team found was that teachers relied on conventional measures: exams, quizzes, student notebooks, group projects and the like.

“There were all kinds of methods used and there was no standard way to get a sense of what was happening,” said Johnson, whose team conducted more research this year.

“The normal things you would use to grade classroom work will continue, but the idea now is that we need to see where the student started at the beginning and how much growth was there at the end of the year,” he said. “This provides for a number of ways to give the district a picture of what is happening.”