Comprehensive Evaluation-Finding A Fit (2009)

Accountability, No Child Left Behind, and snsuring learner success are talked about daily in regard to education and are charges given to agricultural education programs today. Each implies that all parts of an agricultural education program must be evaluated. But against what are we evaluating - the 1920s model or something yet to be fully defined for the 2 1 st century? The program, in which the lead author teaches, is currently in its fifth year of existence. The program began with two teachers and 151 students and has now grown to four teachers and 516 students. Classes are taught at both the middle and high school levels and are housed in two separate buildings that are within walking distance of one another. As the Agricultural Science and Business department within Lebanon High School started to take shape, everyone had one common goal in mind, to make the classroom a priority. Over time as growth has occurred, this goal has remained the same. As the team of teachers expanded, each individual was selected based upon the need they could help fulfill within the program and the qualities they brought to the table. The traditional Agricultural Education Model (Phipps, Osborne, Dyer, & Ball, 2008; Talbert, Vaughn, Groom, & Lee, 2007), depicted as a three-circle Venn diagram (see Figure 1 ) shows a wellbalanced program with three equal components of classroom/laboratory instruction, FFA, and SAE. Over the years, the importance and relevance of this model has been debated and defended as a necessity for a quality agricultural education program. During the almost 100 years of federally-funded public school agricultural education both agriculture and education have changed greatly, yet the model has remained the same. The Lebanon Agricultural Education program approaches the model differently. Although all components of the model are important, a quality program must be centered on the classroom (See Figure 2). Without classroom and laboratory instruction within schools, there would not be FFA or SAE for the students to develop their leadership abilities and career skills. Therefore, the model emphasizes instruction. This emphasis is further enhanced by the type of schedule Lebanon High School is on. The schedule is a modified block with eight 85-minute classes equally divided between two day rotations. This provides an ample amount of time to conduct hands-on activities, labs, and in-depth research projects. Six of the courses taught at Lebanon are in the Advanced Life Sciences; teaching chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and microbiology in the context of agriculture. So, how does the revised model affect comprehensive program evaluation? A major change is that evaluation of the classroom component must become more frequent and more systematic. To address standardized testing requirements in Indiana, the Lebanon Agriculture Department has worked diligently to become proactive rather than reactive. For example, the state now requires end of course assessments, also known as ECA's, for some of the academic core courses. Even though ECA's are not required for all Agricultural Education courses, the Lebanon Agriculture Department has committed to helping the school improve core test scores among its students by using mini-EGAs. Each of the Agricultural Science and Business courses offered are driven by the state standards. Typically a teacher organizes instruction to cover a set of standards, then evaluates student learning through a unit exam. A grade is calculated based on the student's performance and then instruction proceeds to the next unit. By doing this, are teachers really using evaluation to their advantage? Instead of only evaluating instruction at the end of a course, Mini-EGAs are administered as a pre-test, throughout instruction, and at the end of each unit to better evaluate student comprehension on each standard. This allows teachers to quickly see which standards the students have mastered and which need to be re-addressed. …