Project Lead the Way Embarks on 5-Year STEM Assessment Program

  • By Dan Thompson
  • 11/09/09

Project Lead the Way, a not-for-profit organization that promotes engineering and biomedical sciences through project-based learning, has launched an online assessment initiative to monitor the progress of 200,000 high school students per year for the next five years in order to help track their learning in STEM subjects from middle school to high school and beyond.

PLTW partnered with assessment vendor Prometric for the project. Online assessments will be administered in schools as an end of year test and will provide PLTW with information on the students' cognitive development, college readiness, core subject understanding, course schedule, and math and science grades.

"Assessment of student achievement is a top priority for PLTW," said John Lock, chief executive officer of PLTW, in a prepared statement. "We want to produce the most relevant, reliable and timely data available about student learning and participation so that we can constantly improve our program and demonstrate that we are preparing students to become the most innovative and productive in the world. We believe that Prometric has the experience and infrastructure to deliver online assessments in the volume we anticipate."

Project Lead the Way programs are used in 3,000 classrooms across 50 states and the District of Columbia. PLTW has trained 7,000 teachers 5,000 counselors and currently serves 250,000 students.

Further Information about PLTW is available here.

About the Author

Dan Thompson is a freelance writer based in Brea, CA. He can be reached here.

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