Washington Assessment of Student Learning ~ WASL Defined
March 28th, 2007
The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) is a standards-based assessment (not to be confused with a standardized test) which is one of a number of high school graduation examinations adopted by many states as part of the standards-based education reform movement, writes Wikipedia.
The concept of the WASL and the 1993 Education Reform legislation was originally designed by the National Center on Education (NCEE) and Economy led by Marc Tucker whose organization had designed reform efforts of states and districts covering over half of all students nationally by the early 1990s.
The test is used in the state of Washington. Students in third through eighth grade, in Washington’s public schools take the WASL reading and mathematics sections. In addition, fifth and eighth graders are required to take the science section, and fourth and seventh graders also take the writing section. Tenth graders are tested in all four sections. For the Class of 2008 and beyond, the WASL is a graduation requirement.
The state-level WASL assessment includes multiple-choice, short-answer, essay, and problem solving tasks. Students with special needs are accommodated in the normal way by the provision of additional time, special equipment or tests in different formats. The WASL appears to have been designed to invert every criticism of standardized tests, but in fact bring new problems. Standardized tests were introduced to measure ability of very large populations at a low cost. WASL is based on the Authentic Assessment movement. Many educators laud such tests for teaching purposes, but they warn they are not practical for large scale assessment; even the test notes for WASL warn that such scores should not be used for high stakes purposes such as grade promotion or graduation, which is exactly what legislators have passed into law. Multiple choice questions cost only a couple of dollars to score, compared to 30 to 40 dollars for manually scored tests. Machine scored items have only one correct answer, while agreement of barely over 55 percent on a 4-point range is considered to be accurate for the WASL. The Partnership for Learning says that WASL was developed and scored by teachers, but scorers only need a bachelors degree and a few days of training to score these tests.
At Collins College in Tempe AZ prospective teachers may learn WASL design and implementation by starting with basic skills and core curriculum and then advancing to more complex approaches in concept development, critical thinking and WASL application.
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