Finding New Yardsticks for Learning : Education: San Diego County school districts are on the cutting edge of a nationwide trend away from multiple-choice, fill-in- the-bubble testing methods.

Poway teacher Pat Pozzi thought she had a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of her second-grade students at Chaparral School even before her first review of their portfolios, a varied and continuing collection of writings the students have compiled throughout the school year.

But after that initial review of the student folders--together with individual discussions--Pozzi discovered that both she and her students had learned new ways of assessing class progress.

“I found that, when I started talking with the children about their portfolios, they had good and valid reasons for why they had chosen a particular story or assignment for the folder, something that I wouldn’t have thought they would have included, and that led into good discussions about how they might make their next assignment better.”

Pozzi is among a growing number of teachers throughout San Diego County--covering almost all grades--who are experimenting with new ways to judge what students learn in their classes.

From Poway to the South Bay, from San Dieguito to Encanto, county school districts are on the cutting edge of a nationwide push toward performance-based testing, a term used to describe tests that move away from or minimize longstanding multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble measurements.

In the Poway and San Dieguito districts, educators are testing the use of portfolios to learn how students will accept a role in their own assessment, how teachers will adapt to additional paper work if they have a chance to take a more cohesive look at individual students, and how strengths or defects in a particular curriculum will show through a collection of student work.

In San Diego, some schools are piloting not only portfolios but standardized tests that, modeled after state efforts, measure the ability of students to integrate reading and writing by crafting essays from a given body of information.

The thrust toward “authentic assessment” develops from increasing evidence gathered by educational researchers that multiple-choice tests do not do a good job of measuring how a child can apply and manipulate skills or knowledge, only specific skills or factual recall.

Not only educators but employers have complained that, although students may be graduating with more knowledge of particular math and language skills, they prove increasingly unable to apply the information. As Rand Corp. educational director Linda Darling-Hammond has phrased the issue, there is no multiple-choice list available for someone to fill out at his or her desk each morning.

The educational establishment argues that new forms of testing are critical if the public is to receive a fair accounting of whether new math, reading and writing curricula in California and elsewhere truly are teaching more students to think as well as memorize. And educators are well aware that the public continues to demand evidence that students are benefiting from the many reforms, and additional amounts of money, applied to education since the early 1980s, when schools began to receive renewed attention.

“Kids have to think more about what they are doing with information,” said David Mittleholtz, director of the Achievement Goals Program in San Diego city schools, set up originally to raise test scores of minority students. His AGP planners are looking to replace work sheets with portfolios by giving teachers an outline of what to look for and how to manage the paper work.

“Sometimes students get to the right answer without knowing why,” Mittleholtz said. “You can walk around a market long enough and find the mashed potatoes, but there’s a better way.”

With performance-based assessment, students must show their reasoning process behind an answer, he explained.

The move toward such testing has taken root most strongly in the language arts curriculum, where more and more students are now asked to write essays rather than take separate multiple-choice tests on spelling, reading and grammar.

“I like to tell students, ‘How do they know what they think until they write?’ ” said Win Cooper, an English teacher at Torrey Pines High in the San Dieguito Union High School District, and a pioneer in portfolio assessment in California.

Together with colleague Jon Davies, Cooper has persuaded all English teachers in the district’s five secondary schools to experiment with portfolios this year. Last year, 17 teachers tried the technique as part of a move to change student assessment, along with changes in the English curriculum to emphasize more integration of reading and writing, and more use of literature.

“It’s a culmination of a five-year process,” said Cooper, who has also participated in state Department of Education planning to replace multiple choice with essays on the California Assessment Program (CAP) tests, the major annual test of all California students to measure the state’s educational pulse.

Teachers met to decide what students should include in their portfolios. The list includes examples of a piece of writing from rough version to final draft, of their single best piece of writing, of a paper showing how they analyzed a story or article, as well as essays telling why they made their selections and how they view their growth in the class. Not all portfolio selections had been graded previously by the teacher.

“It wasn’t until after we read them for the first time that we found how powerful they are for the kids to self-assess themselves” by thinking about what to put in the portfolio, Cooper said. At the same time, teachers learned more about the students’ progress and about where the curriculum had succeeded or failed in teaching particular concepts or writing styles.

Cooper said San Dieguito teachers are still experimenting and that portfolios must become a regular part of classroom routine in order for students to accept them as more than just another assignment.

“I think students need to see that reflection has to become an ongoing tool in the classroom,” said Cooper, who this year added collaborative writing to the portfolio, where students show how consultation with their classmates on particular assignments helped them hone and improve the final product.

Five teachers at San Diego High School in downtown San Diego have discovered the gap between portfolio theory and practice in their first-year experiment with some 100 10th-graders who are part of an interdisciplinary curriculum in math, physics, English and history.

“Many students are not used to this and just see (portfolios) as extra work,” said Barbara Storms, a writing resource teacher who helped conceive the idea for alternative assessment. “Most students have the sense that teachers do the assessment, and that they shouldn’t have any role in this . . . so they include an assignment that was graded an ‘A’ even though there might be another paper from which they learned more.”

History teacher Irene Segade added, “We need to have more discussions in class so that students do see the portfolio as an integral part,” rather than just compiling it toward the end of a semester.

Although some of the San Diego High students see their portfolios as valuable, others are more skeptical.

“I do think it makes us think more about our education rather than just regurgitating data,” Justin Scarpelli said. “It’s at least a step in the right direction.”

Louie Hernandez was a little frustrated because he had never been asked to review his schoolwork before, pick out what he had done well and describe the progress he had made during the year.

“We never did this at Roosevelt,” Hernandez said of his classes at the junior high school, which feeds students to San Diego High. “But I guess, after I looked through my portfolio, I’ve been able to see what I’ve been doing well or not.”

Several of the students did speak approvingly of including physics papers in their portfolios, saying they learned several scientific concepts from lab assignments that were useful throughout the year.

“I think that shows the value (inherent) in portfolios,” said physics teacher Brent Banta, “since a lot of them chose early experiments in which we were showing how science integrates with philosophy.”

In Poway, teachers Chris Evans and John Winbury have borrowed ideas from San Dieguito in experimenting with portfolios at the elementary school level.

“I think not only do teachers and students get a better sense of where the class is in its writing, it’s easier to share the results with parents,” Evans said. “We have a non-static portfolio, where students can move their work in and out” over the course of a semester.

Evans said teachers can manage the additional paper by not grading every assignment. “It’s hard for teachers to be comfortable with a rough draft” that, if properly included in a portfolio, will serve to show a student’s progress over time.

“We stress that the portfolio should be as much like a ‘motion picture’ as possible, not a snapshot,” Winbury said.

Chaparral teacher Pozzi, an 18-year veteran, is sold on the idea. “In class, the students have learned better what criteria we use for good writing, such as when we discuss what good (story) endings are and what can be done to make them better.

“And I have cut the time it took me before to do report cards because I know where every student is now, after seeing and talking with them about their portfolios, and I can show the parents actual work rather than just grades or a test score.

“And a student now may get C’s all year but still see that he or she didn’t remain static.”

Karen O’Connor, a fourth-grade teacher at Poway’s Sunset Hills School in Rancho Penasquitos, has taken the idea beyond just measuring language skills. In teaching long division, she had all her students write a paragraph or two at home explaining how to perform the mathematic operation. The next day, the students had to exchange writings with fellow students and supply a sample problem that their colleague had to solve by following only the written explanation.

“This really helped the kids understand that math is a thinking process, too,” O’Connor said.

In several San Diego city schools this year, teachers have piloted a standardized essay test designed to replace multiple-choice exams to measure reading comprehension, spelling and grammar. Three times this year, students in certain classes have been given the timed essays.

At Encanto Elementary, sixth-graders in Lynn Lipetzsky’s class were given the text of an imaginary interview with the Wright brothers, an encyclopedic entry about early hot-air and engine-powered flight, and then asked to compose a newspaper article that might have been written about the era.

“The students had a hard time, particularly with this first one,” Lipetzsky said. “They were not used to not having choices to pick from, for one thing. And I think the questions, along with the others we had this year, show that in our curriculum, maybe we aren’t spending enough time teaching kids how to integrate information.”

Nevertheless, Lipetzsky and other teachers piloting the test praise its potential.

“It’s exciting to be able to see their growth from the beginning to the end of the school year,” said Elaine Saville, a second-grade teacher at Hancock Elementary in Tierrasanta.

Added her colleague, first-grade teacher Lynda Elliott, “It’s given me the idea to tape my students reading as well, so I can play it for parents when they come to conferences, and they can hear their kids progressing orally as well.”

San Diego city schools testing director Grant Behnke hopes that the test, along with others being piloted, can both develop general assessment information about a school or district--as now compiled largely through multiple-choice tests--and help teachers look at individual students more accurately.

The district will try performance-based tests in math next fall, in which students will be asked to show how they solved a problem rather than just writing down a final answer. Such tests are tricky to devise, Behnke said, since they must be created in a way such that all students will be able to perform at least a portion of them, even if they fail to get the final answer. Otherwise, a certain percentage of students would sit staring at the ceiling, he said, and there would be no measure of their work.

“All of these efforts in math and language arts are in such an early stage that there isn’t total agreement, even on the vocabulary being used” to describe authentic assessment, Behnke said. “I hope that the word test will come to connote not just a moment of reckoning, which is how a lot of people approach it now, but more as feedback and as a way to improve instruction and the ability to think.”