The complex work of creating competency education mastery and
assessment systems has been one of the most important ongoing tasks
for all of the schools.
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tracking tools will be needed?
How will the program grade and award credit? How can the system, once developed,
be clearly communicated to students, families and other stakeholders? The experiences of the schools as they have addressed these questions over the years reveal:
Designing mastery-driven assessment systems calls for time and creativity. Creating a mastery system has largely
been a custom design endeavor to date. While the design of valid summative
assessments is essential to a competency education assessment system, formative assessments ultimately form the backbone of the system.
Designing an assessment system that is fully transparent to students, faculty, and
outside stakeholders creates powerful buy-in. The schools in this project have been developing
their competency education systems for varying amounts of time: 17 years for Big Picture Learning and Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA); 16 for Diploma Plus; seven years for Casco Bay and four for MSAD15 and Vergennes; a single year for Medical Professions and Teacher Preparation Academy (MPTPA). But whether they’ve been at it for well over a decade or are just getting started, all continue to adjust their school designs to meet the needs of their students and reflect emerg- ing best practices in teaching and competency education. The time and creativity this has taken has been more than any of them initially envi- sioned, but the results have been well worth it. All of the schools began their journey to a com- petency education approach by articulating what mastery would mean within the context of their program(s). This is a complicated nut to crack. It
Table 3: Competency-Based Assessment
Adapted from REAL Institute materials, Boston Day and Evening Academy, 2011. All rights reserved.
What It Is What It Isn’t
Students are placed in appropriate courses based on skill and content knowledge and gaps gleaned through diagnostics.
Students are placed in courses based on age, grade level, or grades on prior coursework.
Students must demonstrate mastery of the com- petencies associated with a course before mov- ing on to the next course in the sequence.
Students demonstrate understanding of a percentage of a course’s content and skills (typically 60-65%) in order to move on to the next course in the sequence.
Assessments are both formative and summative. Assessments are primarily summative Assessments are designed to provide students with the
opportunity to demonstrate mastery of competencies.
Assessments are designed to measure student under- standing of the content of specific units or texts. Students are assessed as Highly Competent,
Competent, Basic Competent or “not yet competent” on each learning target. Failure is not an option.
Students are assessed with an aggregate grade com- posed of the weighted average of both formative and summative assessments (such as tests, homework, quizzes, and labs). Failure on formative assessments can result in course failure, even if students dem- onstrate mastery on summative assessments.
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requires that they determine both what students need to master (content and skills) and what mas- tery looks like (the evaluation and grading system that determines whether a student’s work meets that definition of mastery).
For some schools, this particular part of the work has been fairly simple. At MPTPA, for instance, mastery means meeting or exceeding qualification scores on the University of Cambridge International Examinations. The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and the states that are participating in Excellence for All are establish- ing these qualifying scores, aligning them with research-based college readiness standards. Once students have achieved qualifying exam scores, they can move on to a range of possible path- ways, including a rigorous upper division program designed to prepare them for competitive colleges and universities, a career and technical education pathway leading to a professional credential, or early high school graduation and enrollment in an open enrollment institution such as a community college without needing remediation.
Meanwhile, the bar for mastery at Vergennes Union High School is proficient performance on a set of performance tasks for each of a number of portfolio categories (see Appendix 4 for the list of portfolio categories and examples of two perfor- mance tasks). Over half the teachers at the high school have been involved in writing performance tasks, resulting in strong momentum for implemen- tation throughout the school. In addition, the entire faculty of the high school has met repeatedly to conduct score “calibration,” or “tuning,” ensuring that there is consistency in scoring across class- rooms. This work was guided by technical assis- tance from leaders of the Quality Performance Assessment project at the Center for Collaborative Education. During the day long in-service, the fac- ulty considered key questions, such as:
What will our Proficiency-Based Graduation Requirement (PBGR) toolkit and glossary look like, and how do we create it?
How can we create time for PBGR professional learning communities where we regularly look at student work? How do we help students create their own path and build student-centered learning into our assessment system? What is the best way to be transparent and inclusive with our school
board and our community?
What are our next steps in creating and implementing a system for performance- based graduation requirements?
The Expeditionary Learning/Casco Bay project had a somewhat wider scope. Casco Bay has been affiliated with Expeditionary Learning (EL) since its founding seven years ago. Expeditionary Learning is a national network of 165 schools based on a model that emphasizes active, inquiry-based interdisciplinary learning and has strong evidence of effectiveness.
For this project, Casco Bay formed a collaborative partnership with EL to design version 2.0 of its assessment system and, in the process, create an exemplar to be shared across the EL School Network. Casco Bay also wanted to further develop the daily “building blocks” of a competency
education grading system (strong assessment planning and use of good assessment practices in daily lessons) while tackling some of the perennial challenges of their approach (student work habits and ownership of their learning, deadlines, etc.). Over the course of the year, Casco Bay developed the following components of their system, revising some and creating others from whole cloth (see Appendix 6 for sample tools):
New performance-based graduation outcomes, called Pathways to Success A document describing how graduation
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