Assessing Student Work

Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California’s state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.

Even some of personalized learning’s biggest backers admit that it’s easy to get it wrong.

“Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It’s easy to do it superficially.”

“dynamic systems approach, [which] starts by assuming individuals vary, and seeks to identify stable patterns within that variability”. This, of course, requires rather different training and analytical tools.

In order to rise to this challenge, Rose believes that universities need to stop offering “a batch process” and cater far more flexibly to what real individual students (rather than idealised average students)

Institutions should switch their focus from “grades” to “competency”, partly determined by employers and professional associations, so that students acquire the job-related skills they require and employers become stakeholders in the university system.

Competency-based education turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of awarding credits based on how much time students spend learning, this model awards credits based on whether students can prove they have mastered competencies—the skills, abilities, and knowledge required in an area of study.

By focusing on what you know rather than how much time you spend learning, competency-based education puts you in charge of your education as never before.

The Flexible Option recognizes and rewards prior learning by giving you the opportunity to pass assessments using knowledge you already have. You study only the material you need to master and never spend time or money revisiting things you already know. In addition, an Academic Success Coach will work with you to customize your learning plan based on your knowledge and goals.

“Three important developments stand to dramatically change the way we think about degree programs and pathways: The rapid adoption of competency-based education (CBE) programs, often using industry and employer authority for guiding the creation of the competencies and thus programs An eventual move to suborganizational accreditation, with Title IV funds available for credits, courses, and microcredentials offered by new providers in new delivery models, part of the accelerating trend toward “unbundling” higher education Increasing recognition that postsecondary education will no longer be contained to the existing and traditional degree levels but will instead be consumed at various levels of granularity—less than full degree programs and continuing throughout lives and careers”

For example, in high school, each subject teacher gets one line to present a letter grade or a number grade (sometimes without any kind of precision or explanation as to what the criteria is) and up to three pre-written comment codes to help explain the grade. Often, these pre-written comments don't have anything to do with quality of work or skill level, but focus on behavior and compliance.

happens three times a year in many schools.

parent/teacher conferences

Parks, the university’s registrar, says this allowed the university to “deepen and expand” the experiences on the transcripts, capture more data and clean up a lot of the data that existed in the system.

“Fewer and fewer places are requesting the academic transcript, they’re really only used for graduate school,” Parks says. “So our thought process was, let’s make a transcript more meaningful.”

One of the things Elon noticed was that its African American male students didn’t become as engaged in the five co-curricular experiences Elon tracks (which are leadership, service, internships, global engagement and undergraduate research) until their third year at Elon, compared to their white peers who got involved in similar activities sooner.