What is the LADDER Project Designed to Accomplish?

This project has two major components: (1) the documentation of our first stage FIPSE Project that focused on the development of PASS standards and their alignment with K-12 standards. This will occur via web-based resources that will be disseminated nationally to state higher education systems, departments of education and related audiences who are undertaking standards development and alignment PK-16. The reader is referred to a prior discussion of this first stage in Section II, part b. (2) the development of a model for linking high school assessment data to the college admissions process and subsequent class placement decisions at all seven universities that comprise the Oregon University System (OUS).

Component (2) the development of the model, referred to as LADDER PK-16 will occur in an iterative cycle of two phases.

• Phase 1: Assessment Moderation Panels comprised of high school teachers and college faculty in English, math, and science, insure validity and comparability of high school ratings of student proficiency.
• Phase 2: Teams of higher education faculty and admissions officers then align these ratings as well as state and national assessment data on incoming applicants with class placement decisions.

Review the PASS standards and criteria and the construct for teacher ratings of student proficiency in the documents section to become familiar with the PASS framework as well as provide further rationale for LADDER PK-16. A close examination of the PASS standards and criteria reveals complex targets for assessment that may not be easily judged via tests scores, grade point averages, and other traditional measures and indicators used for college admission.

Standards and criteria developed for college admission.

The standards and criteria were developed over a period of five years beginning with the FIPSE project in 1994 and eventually involving literally hundreds of high school teachers and higher education faculty. Working in an iterative process over 5 years, with classroom teachers in the 65 PASS Network high schools, the standards and criteria were field tested and revised annually. PASS standards were also evaluated in relation to national standards in English, math and science and referenced with other widely validated resources like Kendall and Marzano’s compendium, Content Knowledge (1996). Finally, collections of student work that had been rated by PASS teachers were submitted to “blind” cross-scoring in annual sessions with OUS faculty from the seven universities who teach entry level courses. In this way, OUS ensures that the framework of standards and criteria represents a valid construct of the knowledge and skills that connect the high school curriculum with college entry.

How is teacher judgment used to assess proficiency for college entry?

The PASS proficiency standards and criteria serve as the foundation for teacher judgment by providing clear statements of student learning (standard) as well as what students should do to demonstrate their learning (criteria). For example, English has seven PASS standards, one of which is to Conduct Inquiry and Research. When rating a collection of students in classroomstudent work targeting this standard, a PASS teacher would expect to see evidence of the research process, analysis of information sources and the use of researched information (criteria D1 through D3). The PASS construct for teacher judgment also requires that the conditions of sufficiency and proficiency be met. In other words, individual assignments in the collection of student work must directly address the criteria and provide a variety of opportunities for students to demonstrate learning, (e.g. “on-demand” tasks, out of class projects, and successive revisions). PASS criteria also serve as the organizers for a scoring guide that details performance at the proficient (meets) level.

How are state assessments used to assess proficiency for college entry?

As mentioned previously, Oregon students may meet CIM and PASS standards simultaneously. State and national measures may also be used to verify PASS standards.

However, it has proven difficult to find a direct correspondence between PASS standards such as scientific inquiry or the interpretation of literary works and items on widely used national measures such as the ACT and SAT. This is not a reflection on the merits of any assessment method but rather differences in the purposes for which each measure was designed.