For other areas, teachers develop a unique set of standards for the particular task or set of tasks, as in an authentic assessment. Periodically throughout the school year, we offer training in authentic assessment for any interested parents and community members. Doing so provides us with a pool of raters for teachers to call on. Teachers sometimes call on a peer or an administrator to be a rater. Other times, they may ask a trained parent or community member to come to their classrooms to fill out a rating form.
Students sometimes do self-evaluations.
Teachers arrive at proficiency scores by aggregating numerous ratings from their grade books, including daily work, authentic assessment, homework, and tests. To determine the overall Content Outcome scores for the report card, they average the proficiency scores. For this standard, teachers might include data in a number of areas, including the student's progress in reading a novel or information gathered from CD-ROM and integrated into a research report. Because teachers specify the individual learning strategies and assessment tools used in their classrooms on the proficiency pages, we can be very accountable about how scores are derived, yet very flexible about the route to arriving at them. This is a significant issue in our community.