College, High School Educators Examine Common Standards

by Jay Howard

For two consecutive afternoons in late May, a group from Community College of Philadelphia (Tom Ott, Barbara Spadaro, and Jay Howard) took part, with about 15 other educators, in a meeting sponsored by the Philadelphia Education Fund to consider aligning the assessment policies and procedures used at the North Philadelphia Community Compact (Edison/Fariera, Benjamin Franklin, and William Penn High Schools), Temple University, and Community College of Philadelphia. Each unit presented information on its placement or assessment tests and in an open and candid discussion we tried to answer the question "If I were a 9th grader in Philadelphia, what would I have to learn, or do, to be accepted at Temple University or Community College of Philadelphia?"

Proposed School District Standards

This session focused on language arts, or reading and writing assessment, and a representative of the School District began with a summary of the proposed reading and writing assessments which are to be included in the graduation requirements by 2002.

Future graduates of the Philadelphia public schools should have to take the Stanford Nine Reading Test, or SAT-9, which is a reading test. The SAT-9 seems to be attuned to current practices in the field of reading. It is norm referenced and tests critical thinking with selections which are fairly long and "authentic," or taken from trade publications rather than written for the test. The students answer by both choosing a multiple choice response and also constructing answers, or writing short replies.

The writing assessment under consideration by the Philadelphia School District is the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA). This test is administered over two days; each day the students spend 40 minutes responding to a prompt and writing an essay. Some of the prompts request narrative or informational responses, and others ask for a persuasive paper. The essays are ready by a team of readers and scored on a 6 point scale by a team of readers.

Current College Entrance Requirements

Temple University's placement battery includes a multiple-choice component on sentence skills and a test of reading comprehension, but the discussion was largely about the writing placement. Weeks before the test is taken, students are mailed the prompt, which is likely to be a fairly long paragraph which presents an opinion on a topic. When they come to the placement test, the students have about an hour to write their essay. A "model" essay could be organized around two elements: a summary of the prompt and a response to it. The essays are read holistically and scored on a 6 point scale by a team of readers.

The reading comprehension test used at Temple is the DTLS, which is also used at Community College of Philadelphia. The DTLS, or Descriptive Test of Language Skills, is a standardized, multiple-choice test which was copyrighted 10 years ago and is based on a skills approach to reading. The passages are mainly factual (only one is from a classic work of fiction) and vary in length from about 50 to 500 words. The students are given 45 minutes to answer 45 items.

In contrast, Community College of Philadelphia's writing sample asks the students to "write on demand" a persuasive essay in response to a short prompt. They are given 40 minutes to complete their work, and a "model" paper would be a five-paragraph essay. The essays are read by a team of faculty who score the tests holistically using a 6 point scale. The scores on the reading test, the DTLS, and the writing test are reviewed by in order to place students in appropriate programs.

A Crucial Question

When considering the tests, we kept in mind the focus question, "What would a 9th grader have to know..." and considered various aspects of the tests. In the reading tests, we examined the texts which were used. The high school reading tests seemed to be using authentic passages with a personal tone whereas the college readings seemed to be heavily factual and less personal. The high school writing tests had a carefully constructed rubric of state-wide standards to apply when scoring the essays, and the college writing tests seemed to be more context specific relying on the readers' knowledge of the institution and its expectations. The efficacy of the tests to categorize capable writers who used alternative approaches or who were at the extremes was questioned.

My reaction was that the School District tests are rigorous and correspond to valid educational norms. The scoring protocols for the PSSA writing assessment appear to be similar to the ones used at this college. The SAT-9 reading test is based on a different perspective than Community's and uses different types of materials, but a high score would probably identify students who could read the primary texts and other materials required in courses with interpretive dimension credit as well as the textbooks assigned in the other courses. High achievement on these tests would probably signify readiness for college work. However, the writing test results are not reported for individual students, only schools (see http://www3.phillynews.com/packages/pubed/test.asp for results) and the reading tests have not been included in the graduation requirements or reported on high school transcripts.

The conversation on alignment will probably continue. There may be efforts to continue or reinforce some projects which are in progress. For example, selected graduate stunts at Temple have read and commented on some high school research papers and others from Temple have been involved in the review of portfolios. The suggestion was made that perhaps some high school students would be given the college placement tests in order to help motivate them. The high school teachers might be informed about the college standards through some in-service or other faculty development activities which are still under consideration. We will keep you informed.


List of Articles
Return to Journal home page