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Competency-based learning, which allows students to progress at their own pace after they’ve shown mastery of a subject, rather than by their age, is quickly gaining momentum. Already, a few states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon are moving towards implementing competency-based learning models throughout the entire state. What’s more, 40 states have at least district experimenting with the model. But despite this growth, its proponents say federal policies for accountability and assessment are holding the movement back.

KnowledgeWorks, an organization that supports three education-focused initiatives — New Tech Network, EDWorks and Strive — recently released a report highlighting the pain points between federal policy and a competency-based system. The report, Competency Education Series: Policy Brief One [PDF], points out that, although the federal government has supported some aspects of competency-based learning, implementing the new model can be difficult because of federal restrictions.

“The greatest conflict stems from disconnect with the work on the ground and federal accountability and assessment systems,” the report states. “Implementers faced with this disconnect have no choice but to juggle two systems: one required by federal law and one developed by the educators, students, parents, and community leaders committed to successful implementation of competency education.”

CLASHES OVER TIME

Time is the biggest point of contention between the two systems. The federal government measures school accountability as well as student achievement through time-based modules. Seat time and annual test results are the primary ways that the government keeps schools accountable, categorizes them, and targets them for intervention. And required end-of-year tests focus school instruction timelines in specific ways that do not allow students to move at their own pace, a key element of a competency-based system.

With the competency models, students take summative assessments at various times throughout the year. They demonstrate what they’ve learned as they’re learning — not just during one or two big testing seasons, as most schools do.

WHAT’S WORTH TESTING?

Another big difference between the two systems is what gets tested. Competency-based learning focuses not just on content, but also on “soft skills” like communication, collaboration, and other higher-order thinking skills. In contrast, the federal assessments focus on the subjects of math and English Language Arts aligned with academic achievement standards, but not necessarily with core competencies. In other words, everything is based on a number score, not on whether the student can demonstrate that he can do each individual task determined to be a core competency.

Federal accountability standards track student achievement, not growth. Many competency-based models are tracking progression in career and college readiness as well as core competencies, and those can’t be reported to the federal government under the current rubrics.

COST

The report also identifies limited resources as a roadblock to improve assessments, which they agree are essential, in order to complement the competency-based system. States already spend a significant amount of money on required federal assessments, so there’s no additional money to invest in assessments that would allow for demonstration of mastery or to evaluate throughout a year and not just at the end.

NEXT STEPS

The KnowledgeWorks report doesn’t give a smoking-gun solution for the various problems it raises. Instead, the group intends to continue investigating how federal policies could encourage competency-based learning by studying the effects of the few programs the government has decided to fund in this area. The organization also plans to pull together best practices from states moving ahead despite the challenges and to figure out how competency-based education could be assessed in a more comparative way.

Renato Ganoza/Flickr

In this era of global competition, test scores are used as the primary benchmark to call out which countries will produce “successful” students. Knowing that American students are competing against a global pool of the best and brightest has led education leaders to focus more on how they score on international tests compared to students from other countries.

But high test scores don’t provide a complete picture of students’ success, according to Yong Zhao, world-renown author, scholar, and professor of education at University of Oregon.

“Countries that score highly, have students with lower confidence,” Zhao said in his keynote address to educators gathered online for the 2013 Leadership Summit.

That seems counter-intuitive, and Zhao isn’t claiming a causal connection — he questions whether focusing on test scores might inadvertently lower confidence. Zhao has analyzed data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and discovered a negative correlation between high math scores and confidence.

Similarly, in his analysis of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test that analyzes how countries score in reading, math and science, Zhao found a negative correlation between attitude and attainment. In other words, the countries with lower scores had students who reported higher interest in the subjects. Zhao analyzed media stories from high scoring countries like Korea and Japan, where students don’t show enough confidence or enthusiasm for subjects in which they excel.

He found the same results when he looked at students’ belief in their entrepreneurial capacity, their ability to start businesses or be self-starters. “Everybody is trying to perfect this system and make a good bet about the knowledge and skills that our children might need,” he said. “All of this says that the measures we use to measure education outcomes, to view them as the best education systems in terms of test scores, do not result in the same kinds of things we might value otherwise — entrepreneurial capabilities, confidence, enjoyment.”

TESTING FOR THE WRONG QUALITIES

Zhao’s findings have led him to question the value of the tests altogether. If the stated goal is to get kids ready for careers, and careers demand confidence, creativity, and an entrepreneurial attitude, then why focus on test scores that seem to produce the opposite effect?

“A lot of times teachers have been asked to improve our schools, to make our schools more effective, but the question I’m raising is, effective at what?” Zhao said. “Some reading programs could improve your students’ reading scores, but cause your students to hate education.” He’s concerned that national initiatives like the Common Core State Standards could have unintended consequences.

In Zhao’s view, most education systems start out by defining the outcomes. They make a bet about which skills will be important and promise that if students master those skills, they will succeed. Zhao sees this as a flawed approach because it forces everyone into a homogenous group, a bit like making sausage out of all different kinds of meat. Defining outcomes allows systems to measure results, but it stamps out individuality.

Countries that score well on international exams, like Korea, have clearly defined outcomes, narrow curricula, and dictatorial systems with clear ranking and sorting systems. Students know exactly how they stack up in that system.

“Everybody is reminded everyday that they have to master the skills,” Zhao said. “But in the process you have people who are either kicked out of the system or put down into a different school and they will lose confidence.”  By valuing what’s prescribed and assessed, the system creates a uniform group with little confidence in the individual’s unique contributions.

Zhao pointed to the tremendous amount of local control in the U.S. educational system as both its savior and a contributing factor to its lower test scores. It allows for different types of schools and for students to demonstrate that they can be good at different things. There are arts schools, engineering schools and schools focused on bi-lingual education. That kind of choice allows students the chance to find what they are good at. The U.S. system also gives learners many second chances to keep learning and find their strengths.

[RELATED READING: Some Ask: What's the Value of Common Core State Standards?]

“The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao said. “We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths.” Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial. For Zhao, the new model has to be about creating a new middle class based on creativity.

To do that, he suggests giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate to fill the gaps that each country, school or teacher experiences.

ZHAO’S INITIATIVES

Zhao is actively trying to create the learning experiences he has written and lectured about. He’s started an online education community called ObaWorld, which costs $1 per student per year and is a closed, private site. It’s a cloud-based learning platform, like Moodle, and includes similar features like the ability to make and evaluate portfolios. But Zhao is most excited that he’s recruiting students and teachers from all over the world to participate. So a teacher can create a tool or course and put it on ObaWorld to help an educator on the other side of the country.

His other big push is to create more entrepreneurial school leaders through the Global Education Leadership Master’s program, which is based online and accredited through University of Oregon. Students will have to create a product that will improve education and will be encouraged to think about schools as entrepreneurial global enterprises.

SimCity

As game-based learning gains momentum in education circles, teachers increasingly want substantive proof that games are helpful for learning. The game-makers at the non-profit GlassLab are hoping to do this with the popular video game SimCity.

GlassLab is working with commercial game companies, assessment experts, and those versed in digital classrooms to build SimCityEDU, a downloadable game designed for sixth graders. Scheduled to be be released in the fall of 2013, it builds on SimCity’s city management theme, but provides specific challenges to players in the subject of STEM.

“The big pain point we’ve heard from teachers is that they cannot entertain their kids to the level that they are being entertained outside of the classroom,” said Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab. “They want to be able to create meaningful learning experiences and they just can’t compete with the digital tools their kids are accessing all the time.”

Teachers have been using the commercial version of SimCity as a classroom tool for a long time, but with the newest version recently released and the EDU version soon to follow, GlassLab is trying to convene an online community of educators already working in the space, asking them to think creatively about what the game could do, offering lesson plans, and helping teachers to collaborate and share ideas.

SimCityEDU grew out of research conducted by the MacArthur foundation on how gaming can mirror formative assessments [PDF] – measuring understanding regularly along the learning path, rather than occasionally or at the end of a unit, as is most common. Their research found that games gather data about the player as he or she makes choices within the game, affecting the outcome. In games, players “level-up,” moving on to higher levels when they’ve mastered the necessary skills; similarly teachers scaffold lessons to deepen understanding as a student grasps the easier concepts.

[RELATED READING: Money, Time and Tactics: Can Games Be Effective in School?]

SimCityEDU, funded by the Gates and Macarthur foundations, will provide assessments that are aligned with Common Core State Standards. The EDU version uses the same code as the commercial game, but with the addition of using students’ choices during challenges as a method of assessment. GlassLab is still working to develop all the challenges based on focus-group feedback on student interests, but the one challenge they know they’ll include focuses on the environment, based on positive feedback from the focus groups.

“These kids are fascinated by the environment,” Lindl said.

Students will be asked to conduct interviews and look at research to determine what kind of power plant to build in the town. As they play, taking photo documentation, interpreting the information they’ve gathered, drawing conclusions, graphing the data and finally making a decision, the game assesses each choice. Teachers will have a tool to see how each child’s play matches up against Common Core standards.

And game developers hope that the incremental data will help teachers know when to step in and offer more help. For example, if an interview contradicts scientific evidence, the student will have to discern bias, figure out how to weight the various pieces of evidence differently, and back up conclusions with data and text.

SimCityEDU will not go to market until third-party assessor, SRI International, has validated by testing students who’ve played the game using a completely different assessment tool to ensure the game works.

FOCUSED LEARNING VS. EXPLORATION

GlassLab plans to offer the downloadable game at little to no cost for schools and teachers, Lindl said. However, the clear narrative and objectives within SimCityEDU depart from other commercial games that have been appropriated by teachers — like Minecraft. That game offers a free-form experience that teachers can easily manipulate to serve their lessons, a quality many teachers like.

[RELATED READING: Teachers Transform Commercial Game for Class Use]

“We want teachers to be able to choose between a free exploration or something more focused,” Lindl said. But there’s a catch. If educators want to use the broader SimCity world for free-form exploration they’ll have to buy the commercial license – a cost of about $60. Getting both the focused and free-form experience could cost more than many educators are willing to pay.

Not all education experts agree that assessment should be built into games. “The game should be a place of play and experimentation,” said Henry Jenkins, a USC professor on the forefront of game-based learning. “Meta-gaming is where the learning could be without disrupting the ecology of the game.” The “meta-game” is the world outside the game often composed of fans who discuss what they are making in the game with one another, write fan fiction and in other ways continue to create material even when not playing.

Flickr: ccarlstead

As any parent or teacher knows, tests can create crippling anxiety in students–and anxious kids can perform below their true abilities. But new research in cognitive science and psychology is giving us a clearer understanding of the link between stress and performance, and allowing experts to develop specific strategies for helping kids manage their fears. These potential solutions are reasonably simple, inexpensive and, as recent studies show, effective. Some work for a broad range of students, while others target specific groups. Yet they’re unfamiliar to many teachers and parents, who remain unaware that test anxiety can be so easily relieved. Here, three such approaches:

1.   UNLOAD ON PAPER.

When students feel nervous, their capacity to think clearly and solve problems accurately is reduced, says Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago. Students taking an exam must draw on their working memory, the mental holding space where we manipulate facts and ideas. “When students are anxious, their worries use up some of their working memory, leaving fewer cognitive resources to devote to the test,” Beilock explains. One method recently tested successfully by Beilock and a colleague, Gerardo Ramirez, had students spend ten minutes writing about their thoughts and feelings immediately before taking a test. The practice, called “expressive writing,” is used by psychologists to reduce negative thoughts in people with depression. They tried the intervention on college students placed in a testing situation in Beilock’s lab, and in an actual Chicago school, where ninth-grade students engaged in the writing exercise before their first high school final. In both cases, students’ test scores “significantly improved,” according to an article they published last year in the journal Science.

While one might imagine writing about a looming exam would only heighten students’ anxiety, Beilock says the opposite was the case. “Writing about their worries had the effect of ‘offloading’ them onto the page, so that the students had more cognitive horsepower available to apply to solving problems on the test,” she explains. For both groups, Beilock and Ramirez reported in Science, “one short writing intervention that brings testing pressures to the forefront enhances the likelihood of excelling, rather than failing, under pressure.”

2.   AFFIRM YOUR VALUES.

Apprehension over tests can be especially common among minority and female students. That’s because the prospect of evaluation poses for them what psychologists call “stereotype threat”—the possibility that a poor performance will confirm negative assumptions about the group to which they belong (among the specious, anxiety-inducing tropes: girls can’t excel in math and science; blacks and Latinos aren’t college material). This additional layer of anxiety can lead such students to perform below the level they are capable of. “Girls, and black and Latino students, are often dealing with a double dose of test anxiety,” says Stanford University psychologist Gregory Walton. “The nervousness everyone feels when they’re being evaluated, plus the worry—conscious or not—that a poor performance will prove that the negative assumption about their group is correct.”

[Related: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype?]

Walton’s colleague at Stanford, psychology professor Geoffrey Cohen, devised an intervention aimed at reducing stereotype threat. Like the exercise designed by Beilock and Ramirez, it asks students to write briefly, but in this case participants are instructed to choose something they value and write about why it matters to them. “Music is important to me because it gives me a way to express myself when I’m mad, happy, or sad,” one participant wrote. In one study, this “values affirmation” exercise was shown to shrink the performance gap between white and black students by 40 percent. In another, it erased the gap in test scores between women and men enrolled in a challenging college physics course, raising the women’s average grade from a C to a B (higher than the average male student’s grade).

3.   ENGAGE IN RELAXATION EXERCISE.

Younger kids aren’t immune from test anxiety. As early as first and second grade, researchers see evidence of anxiety about testing. Their worries tend to manifest in non-verbal signs that adults may miss, says psychologist Heidi Larson: stomachaches, difficulty sleeping, and a persistent urge to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. “I had one mother tell me that her son had no problem with tests,” recalls Larson, a professor of counseling and student development at Eastern Illinois University. “Then a week later she came back and said that her son had burst into tears the night before the big end-of-year exam, saying that he was afraid he wouldn’t be promoted to the next grade.”

[Related: How to Deal With Kids' Math Anxiety]

Larson designed an intervention especially for younger students, involving breathing and relaxation exercises, and examined its effectiveness on a group of third-graders. “We had students lie on mats on the floor of their classrooms. They closed their eyes and we asked them to focus on their breathing, then on tensing and relaxing groups of muscles in their legs, arms, stomachs and so on,” Larson recounts. “Some of the kids became so relaxed they fell asleep!” A control group of students at another school received no such training. The study, which was published in the Journal of School Counseling in 2010, reported that the relaxation intervention had “a significant effect in reducing test anxiety.”

Read Annie Murphy Paul’s full feature article on test anxiety in the current issue of Time.

Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks

Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning. Because the criteria are intangible, it’s difficult to define or pinpoint exactly what they are. But one group is giving it a try.

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. They sifted through and categorized the research on learning science, documented case studies, and compiled policy recommendations they hope will transform the current system.

Their book, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice and the accompanying practitioner’s guide, lay out the key principles for designing learning environments that will help students build skills useful in a world where jobs are increasingly information and knowledge-based. The principles are not job-specific – no one knows what the future economy will demand. Instead, the main goal is to develop self-directed learners, students with “adaptive expertise.”

“Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. “You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.”

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World]

Groff doesn’t dispute that mastery is important and that students need to learn age-appropriate content, but she also argues it’s equally important to develop students’ ability to go beyond that, to question and apply learning in new situations.

To that end, these are their identified principles for innovative learning.

1. 1.Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom with activities focused on their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study process, set goals, and monitor their own learning process.
2. 2. Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone. “By our nature we are social beings and we learn by interacting,” Groff said. “We learn by pushing and pulling on concepts with one another.” Structured, collaborative group work can be good for all learners; it pushes people in different ways.
3. 3. Emotions are an integral part of learning. Students understand ideas better when there’s interplay between emotions, motivation and cognition, so positive beliefs about oneself are a core part of reaching a more profound understanding. The power of emotions and motivation in the classroom are well documented, but often overlooked because they are “soft.” Still most teachers know that if a student is upset about something that happened at home or in school, he won’t learn well. Similarly, keeping students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it matters, learning becomes more important to them.
4. 4. Learners are different and innovative learning environments reflect the various experiences and prior knowledge that each student brings to class. “You really want practices and processes that help teachers engage each student where they are,” said Groff. This principle is understood by every frustrated educator teaching to a “middle” that doesn’t exist.
5. 5. Students need to be stretched, but not too much. “It’s really critical to find that student’s sweet spot,” Groff Said. Educators should try to prevent both coasting and overloading. Students need to experience both academic success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this as students at different levels help one another.
6. 6. Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Assessments are important, but only to gauge how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning environment itself. “Good teachers do this informally most of the time,” Groff said. “But when it’s done well and more formally it’s a whole structure and methodology where you collect feedback on the learning pathway and it drives the next step that you take.”
7. 7. Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out into the real world. Learning can’t be meaningful if students don’t understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for the ability to transfer skills and adapt. “We can’t just have things remain in silos that never interact,” Groff said.

IMPLEMENTING THE PRINCIPLES

Many of the seven principles Groff outlines are second nature to good teachers, but they can feel hard to achieve within education systems that are slow-moving, bureaucratic and resistant to change. Still Groff says there are ways for teachers who want to create an innovative learning environment to begin down the path, even without the full support of their colleagues and administration. Groff also hopes shifting to the Common Core could offer openings for building in these practices. “It’s designed in a way that condones a lot of the principles that we’ve been talking about,” she said.

Everyone knows the common barriers educators face: the school culture, the students and themselves. Groff says with some reflection and problem solving, teachers can often begin to work around these barriers. An educator might think she’s open to innovation without realizing that there are preconceived notions about how one should teach that are deeply ingrained.

What’s more, if the school culture does not encourage experimentation, educators can mitigate negative reaction by framing the ideas in a way that will be accepted, or by bringing in outside resources to try and convince naysayers. Even finding one colleague in or outside of the school to bounce ideas with can make the process much smoother.

Educators can also test ideas with students before implementing them. Students have been indoctrinated into the same educational mindset about what makes a “useful” education as everyone else, and some might be resistant to new teaching methodologies. Without their enthusiasm it can be hard to persevere through other obstacles.

CASE STUDY

The darling of the Innovative Learning Environment case studies is the Jenaplan School in Germany. It’s one of the few schools embodying all the principles fluidly. The school has about 450 students that range three to 20 years old. Students aren’t broken up into grade levels, instead they learn in mixed-age groups as well as in groups of roughly the same age. Learning is directed by students, often project-based, evaluated primarily through writing and projects, self-assessments and peer-assessment. The schedule is periodic, focusing on a topic like geography or history for three to four weeks and crossing into multiple disciplines. The teacher is seen as an active mentor and coordinator and the school has active parental involvement.

The Jenaplan School has won awards for its model and in the eyes of the Innovative Learning Environment researchers is doing an excellent job at preparing students to be adaptive and nimble thinkers in a knowledge-based world.

Flickr: albertogp123

By Ann Dornfeld

An entire school of teachers in Seattle is refusing to give students a standardized test that’s required by the district. The teachers say the test is useless and wastes valuable instructional time.

Meanwhile, individual teacher protests of standardized tests are popping up nationwide, and the Seattle case may make bigger waves.

Students in Seattle Public Schools take a test called the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, up to three times a year, from kindergarten through at least ninth grade. The school district requires the test to measure how well students are doing in reading and math — in addition to annual standardized tests required by the state.

The MAP test is used as part of the teacher-evaluation process, and it’s supposed to help teachers gauge students’ progress.

“We’ve lost a whole lot of class time. I don’t know what the test was about, and I just see no use for it at all,” says Kit McCormick, who teaches English at Garfield High School.

McCormick says teachers are never allowed to see the test, so she has no idea how to interpret her students’ scores.

“So I’m not going to do it. But I’d be happy to have my students evaluated in a way that would be meaningful for both them and me,” she says.

Instead of this kind of high-stakes testing, teachers at Garfield propose that student learning be judged by portfolios of their work.

The school’s academic dean, Kris McBride, was supposed to administer the test this week. Instead, she’s standing behind the teachers. McBride says a major problem with the test is that it doesn’t seem to align with district or state curricula.

“In fact, our Algebra 1 students go in and sit in front of a computer and take this math test. It’s filled with geometry; it’s filled with probability and statistics and other things that aren’t a part of the curriculum at all,” she says.

ADMINISTRATIVE EXPECTATIONS

Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Jose Banda says the teachers are expected to fulfill their responsibilities.

He says the MAP test’s frequency is useful in making sure students are learning what they should be but has invited teachers to take part in a formal district review of its effectiveness. That still doesn’t let them off the hook from administering the test, though.

[RELATED: Movement Against Standardized Tests Grow as Parents Opt Out]

“In the meantime, they have duties they’re supposed to complete, making sure that this assessment is given,” he says.

Banda says instead of boycotting the MAP test, teachers should work with the district to find solutions to their concerns.

A ‘RIPPLE EFFECT’?

In recent years, individual teachers around the country have refused to give standardized tests, says New York University education professor Diane Ravitch. A critic of the nationwide trend of high-stakes standardized testing, Ravitch says this move by entire school of teachers is unusually gutsy.

“No one likes what’s going on, but no one has really found a mechanism to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong,’” she says. “So I think this is incredibly encouraging, too, and I am sure that they will be applauded by teachers around the country. They may even have a ripple effect on other schools.”

That’s already happening in Seattle. Now, a group of elementary teachers at another school there says it will boycott the MAP test, too.

UNMOTIVATED STUDENTS 

Not surprisingly, students also support the test boycott.

“I don’t like any standardized tests, but I feel like some may be necessary,” says 16-year-old Alicia Butler, a junior at Garfield.

She says she’s OK with taking the state tests to graduate, or the SATs to get into college. But she says students don’t take the MAP test seriously, and that could hurt good teachers.

“Since people are aware that we don’t need it to graduate, they’ll just start clicking on things,” she says. “A lot of these teachers here are good, so they’ll get lower evaluations, and it’s not fair.”

The school district hasn’t said what it will do to any teacher who fails to give students the MAP test. The superintendent has given them until Feb. 22 to comply.

Via NPR.