Mississippi State is receiving approximately $5 million to develop a unified program for scoring and reporting statewide career and education assessments. The newly funded Mississippi Assessment Center is based at the Research and Curriculum Unit in Starkville and is a part of Mississippi State’s Office of Research.
“Career and technical education classes are also called secondary and post-secondary vocational classes,” assessment project manager Denise Sibley said. “Classes such as allied health or welding in high school and post-secondary classes such as gerontology and automotive technology are good examples of the classes we write and score assessments for.”
Previously, ordering, scoring and reporting these assessments took place at Southern Illinois University, she said.
“They would give a copy to us and then we would run all the stats,” she said. “Basically we did only the things they did not do.”
Sibley said the new contract makes a huge impact economically.
“The state of Mississippi is unique from most states because we have a standardized curriculum that everybody is using, and we have a standardized assessment that is completely aligned to that curriculum.”
Cindy Morgan, coordinator of assessment and accountability of the Research and Curriculum Unit, said Mississippi is ahead of the curve when compared to other states and that having one center for the complete process will increase efficiency and provide higher quality assistance to Mississippi’s career and technical centers.
“Since few states have their own standardized career and technical assessments aligned to a statewide curriculum framework, we are extremely proud to now have the entire process consolidated literally under one roof,” Morgan said.
Sibley demonstrated the efficiency of Mississippi’s consolidation of test scoring and reporting.
“We have a data retreat that we do every year, and we get all the teachers, directors, counselors and everybody who is involved in improving student learning together, and we go over these reports,” she said. “We explain to them how they can read those reports to determine their strengths and weaknesses in the classroom.”
Sibley said that it all goes back to assisting the teachers in helping the students better. The MAC prepares its reports to be very user-friendly, makes them structurally sensitive and breaks the reports out by competencies.
She also suggested that the assessments be used in students’ grades.
“The students take these assessments, but the score that they get does not have to affect their grade. One of the hurdles we’ve had to get over was if a student doesn’t think the test will affect them, they’re not going to care about the assessment.”
She said it is great that Mississippi is so far ahead of the other states.
“When we go to these conferences and people are talking about where they’re trying to get to as a state, they’re usually astonished that Mississippi is so far ahead,” Sibley said.
“All I have to do is tell them all we’ve done already, and they can believe why we are so far ahead.