10 Florida Districts Crowdsource Assessment Tools
A group of 10 rural school districts in Northeastern
Florida
are joining forces to "crowdsource" their assessment tools. The 10
districts
that make up the North
East Florida Educational Consortium (NEFEC) have
partnered with Performance
Matters, a company that provides digital assessment
tools, to create an assessment platform that all of the districts can
use.
Florida state requirements call for all graded
courses to have
end-of-course (EOC) tests, a task that is both expensive and
time-consuming for
small school districts. So the NEFEC is using a new product from
Performance
Matters, called Unify,
as an assessment platform that all its member districts
can both create and use.
Last summer, teachers from the 10 NEFEC districts
worked
together to determine which Florida state standards are best suited to
use on
summative assessments. The Unify platform was then able to help them
develop assessment
blueprints that the individual districts, schools and teachers can then
use as
frameworks for building their own EOC tests.
"This allows teachers from our member districts to
pool their
resources to author, review, approve and share high-quality assessment
content,
which is a huge benefit in terms of efficiency and cost savings," said
Adam G.
Azula, NEFEC program development and training specialist.
So far, the districts have developed assessment tools
for 300
courses. The same group that initiated the process last summer will
review the
content this month and begin using it for the end-of-the-school year
tests in
May.
"This collaboration makes it affordable to develop
EOC tests
in all courses, even in a small rural district like ours," said Marcie
M.
Tucker, a teacher support colleague in the Union County School District. "Everything
we need to create an EOC test is there in one place, just a click away."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.