In 2012, EPIC was awarded a multi-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the College and Career Readiness Task Bank: Alternative Pathways for Demonstrating Proficiency project. The project seeks to achieve four major aims:
- Contribute to an empirical understanding of college and career readiness through an analysis of entry-level coursework.
- Use the results of the course content analysis to develop representative tasks that also identify a rational, necessary skills, and relevant Common Core State Standards, enabling students to demonstrate proficiency in English/language arts, science, and social studies as well as readiness for college and careers.
- Conduct two classroom pilots with high school instructors and entry-level college faculty to collect student work samples to use as exemplars, generate rubrics, and collect instructor feedback used to refine tasks.
- Provide freely available performance assessment tasks, rubrics, and resources to educators. Click here to view these materials.
The results and materials from this study contribute to the ongoing conversation around college and career readiness and respond to increased interest in performance tasks as an alternate and/or additional form of assessment. Tasks developed for this work cans be used as formative assessments, allowing educators to modify/inform their teaching as students work toward demonstrating proficiency and college- and career- ready levels of performance. The task bank will serve as a resource for educators in proficiency/competency based efforts, those interested in preparing students for performance assessments, those interested in aligning secondary school rigor with entry level-college expectations, and educators implementing the Common Core State Standards.