In June, 2001, the Kentucky Board of Education accepted new performance standards that resulted from a comprehensive process involving more than 1,600 Kentucky teachers, various advisory groups, and which provided for public input.
These new standards set the stage for the work that lies ahead of Kentucky's educators: To improve the academic achievement of all our students.
The new standards are important because they define what we mean when we say a student has performed at the "novice," "apprentice," "proficient" or "distinguished" level. They clarify for teachers, students and parents how we evaluate student work, and they explain for students what we expect of them.
These new standards were developed over the past year, by Kentucky teachers in the most comprehensive standards-setting process ever undertaken by any state, national or international testing system.
The 1,600 Kentucky Teachers who helped develop the standards participated in three different methods to zero in on the most appropriate performance standards in each subject. This broad, collaborative advisory process involved teachers from every part of the state. The process itself was designed and overseen by a panel of the nation's top testing experts (the National Technical Advisory Panel on Assessment and Accountability, NTAPAA, which has guided development of CATS all along).
The purpose was to produce a set of clear, consistent, agreed-upon recommendations for standards establishing high expectations for student achievement.
Here is how the new standards were developed:
• In December 1999 and January 2000, 88 teachers drafted written descriptions of the student performance standards for Novice, Apprentice, Proficient and Distinguished. This group reviewed the past system and provided modifications and elaborations. The purpose was to clearly state the meaning of Novice, Apprentice, Proficient and Distinguished in each content area and at each level of schooling, and to develop a common starting point for each of the next three steps.
• In April 2000, 960 teachers used the Contrasting Groups procedure to recommend standards. In this procedure, the teachers examined actual student work and matched it with the descriptions of Novice, Apprentice, Proficient and Distinguished developed in the first step. Teachers could also classify students into borderline groups: Novice/Apprentice, Apprentice/Proficient or Proficient/Distinguished.
• In October 2000, 311 teachers applied the Jaeger-Mills procedure. The teacher panels reviewed test items, student responses and scores from the Kentucky Core Content Tests administered in Spring 2000, and then sorted each student's performance into one of three levels (low, medium or high) within each category, Novice, Apprentice, Proficient and Distinguished.
• In December 2000, 292 teachers applied the CTB Bookmark procedure. The teacher panels examined test booklets in which the items were ranked according to difficulty, and then placed bookmarks at the point in the booklet where they thought the difficulty of the next test item represented a change from one performance level to the next.
• In February 2001, 133 teachers drawn from the previous teacher groups synthesized the results of the Contrasting Groups, Jaeger-Mills and CTB Bookmark procedures.
• Between May 10 and May 28, 2001, more than 3,000 people -- 2,891 identifying themselves as educators -- responded to a Kentucky Department of Education online survey about the standards-setting process. Slightly more than 32 percent of the respondents said they were "very comfortable" or "comfortable" with the standards-setting process. Only 16 percent said they were uncomfortable with the process. A total of 3,184 people commented on the process by which the standards were developed and/or reviewed the descriptions and submitted comments for the Kentucky Board of Education. This input was considered by the board in accepting the standards.
Because World Languages are not part of the core content, the terms distinguished, proficient, apprentice and novice are replaced by: "exceeds expectations", "meets expectations", "approaches expectations", and "struggles to meet expectations".