Student Assessment and Program Evaluation
From the initial planning stages, the reform’s leaders understood that district leadership held them accountable for improving student achievement in mathematics and science. For this reason, they included student assessment and program evaluation as one of CMSI’s strategic approaches/strands to reach the reform’s goals of improving instruction and developing the workforce. They believed that student assessment and program evaluation would provide critical information. With input from both, they would be able to understand what students were learning and the impacts of various program activities. They would be able to link classroom instruction with student assessment results and teacher professional development, as called for in the research literature (e.g., Greene, Caracelli, & Graham (1989; Darling-Hammond, et al. (1995) Black and Wiliam, 1998). Also, they would be able to review and improve program activities based on evaluation data (Frechtling and Sharp, 1997; Patton, 1986). This section describes program efforts around these two strategic components.
