Renaissance High School is being reviewed for accreditation this year by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).
In preparation for their visit, the staff is focusing heavily on:
1) selecting essential standards
2) performing accurate assessment of the selected standards
3) reviewing the assessed data
4) actively modify our instruction to ensure the standards are being taught
An essential standard is being defined as: a standard deemed so important within a discipline, that each instructor commits to teaching it within her course. In other words, EVERY student enrolled in a specific course would learn the essential standards, no matter which instructor taught the class.
The standards for each course are to be selected from the designated list of approved California State Standards.
For the morning Integrated Science courses, we agreed on 9/10/08 to teach the following essential standards to all our students:
PHYSICS-Waves:
4a. Students know waves carry energy from one place to another.
4e. Students know radio waves, light, and X-rays are different wavelength bands in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves whose speed in a vacuum is approximately 186,000 miles/sec.
CHEMISTRY-Atoms & Molecules:
1a. Students know how to relate the position of an element in the periodic table to its atomic number
and atomic mass.
1b. Students know how to use the periodic table to identify metals, semimetals, nonmetals, and halogens.
1d. Students know how to use the periodic table to determine the number of electrons available for bonding.
1e. Students know the nucleus of the atom is much smaller than the atom yet contains most of its mass.
2a. Students know atoms combine to form molecules by sharing electrons to form covalent or metallic bonds or by exchanging electrons to form ionic bonds.
BIO/LIFE-Ecology:
6b. Students know how to analyze changes in an ecosystem resulting from changes in climate, human activity, introduction of nonnative species, or changes in population size.
6d. Students know how water, carbon, and nitrogen cycle between abiotic resources
and organic matter in the ecosystem and how oxygen cycles through photosynthesis and respiration.
6f. Students know at each link in a food web some energy is stored in newly made structures
but much energy is dissipated into the environment as heat.
EARTH-Biogeochemical:
7a. Students know the carbon cycle of photosynthesis and respiration and the nitrogen cycle.
7b. Students know the global carbon cycle: the different physical and chemical forms of carbon in the atmosphere, oceans, biomass, fossil fuels, and the movement of carbon among these reservoirs.
INVESTIGATION/EXPERIMENTATION:
a. Select and use appropriate tools and technology (such as computer-linked probes, spreadsheets, and graphing calculators) to perform tests, collect data, analyze relationships, and display data.
d. Formulate explanations by using logic and evidence.
k. Recognize the cumulative nature of scientific evidence.
l. Analyze situations and solve problems that require combining and applying concepts from more than one area of science.
The next step is to decide upon the assessments for these standards.
The benefits and limitations of this evaluation will include:
Benefits:
*Make sure the school is in compliance with the state’s required standards (as assessed on yearly tests).
*Make sure each science student in our school receives an equitable education.
*Lead instructors to reflect upon whether the identified standards are indeed “essential” as defined by our school community.
*Open a dialogue between instructors that may lead to increased collaboration towards overt standardization of courses.
Limitations:
*Our school is a continuation high school of roughly 200 students. This means that the sample size will be small.
*As a continuation high school, students come and go frequently, making pre- and post-tests difficult. This will further shrink the sample size.
*For some courses, there is only one instructor, making collaboration and peer review difficult.
The factors that will ensure the evaluation will be successful will include:
*Effort will be spent in advance to properly design the evaluation process in clearly stated, easy to follow steps.
*Each instructor is required by the principal to commit to developing assessments for the agreed upon standards, administering the assessments, and sharing the collected data for review. This will generate the information required for review and subsequent planning for instructional modifications.
*Assessment tools will be carefully selected so that the collected data may be directly compared to the data collected by colleagues teaching the same course.
The evaluation results may be used to:
*Demonstrate the school indeed teaches the agreed upon state standards or identify which standards are not being taught.
*Identify which standards need improved instruction to increase student ability to demonstrate understanding.
*Drive future restructuring of the school’s organization to better serve our unique student needs.