Livingston is a large, diverse school in California’s Central Valley. After working with Inflexion to define their maxims, they reinforced them everywhere. Here are ideas and tactics for making yours actionable, so student outcomes improve.
Over the course of the 2016-2017 school year the leadership team at Ocean View High School decided to take a step back and, specifically looking at their student outcomes, evaluate whether or not they were striving toward a holistic definition of student readiness.
Walking off the stage at my high school graduation, I remember thinking that the transition into my “next chapter” would consist entirely of the extended weekend of freshman orientation at Linfield College, moving all of my stuff into my dorm room, meeting my new roommates, and attending my first day of classes. Period.
Since 2015, California policymakers have invested more than a billion dollars to support the expansion of Career and Technical Education (CTE) across the state.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with schools not just in our area, but also around the world. Through a number of research and consulting projects, we visited schools and spoke with educators about how they prepare students to be ready for life after high school.
With the goals of college readiness and student engagement in mind, WHS built a Senior Inquiry course that mirrored an approach to instruction often seen in postsecondary institutions– one that is cross-curricular and student driven.
Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete choice experiments (DCEs). Our evaluation detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs presented by each approach’s design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. We found that researchers rely heavily upon self-report instruments to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-report instruments evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found that SJTs and DCEs may mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report when measuring interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. We make recommendations for future development of these formats.
College & Career Readiness Task Bank Inflexion (formerly EPIC) created a set of performance tasks based on the results of a two-year study of over 2,000 college and university syllabi,…
Understanding Entry-Level Courses in American Institutions of Higher Education outlines a study conducted by EPIC that empirically identifies the characteristics of work at the college- and career-readiness level in English/language arts, science, and social sciences courses.
Earlier this month, the Education Trust published a new report, Meandering Toward Graduation: Transcript Outcomes of High School Graduates (available at https://edtrust.org/resource/meandering-toward-graduation/ or below). Wow, I love that descriptive verb…
