Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) Version 3 Standardizing Data to Support Formative Assessment Processes

Last week at STATS-DC I was joined by Nancy Burke, Grafton Public School District (North Dakota), Lee Rabbitt, Newport Public Schools (Rhode Island), and David Weinberger, Yonkers Public Schools (New York) for this presentation about Standardizing Data to Support Formative Assessment Process Use in Schools.  My three co-presenters are members of the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) Stakeholders Group and have been an important part of the CEDS version 3 focus on teaching and leaning.


One thing interesting about this presentation was that we used PowerPoint as our "sandbox" for the development work, so the presentation content developed long before we knew it would be a presentation at STATS-DC.  We started by developing a model of the human processes, and had that fully defined before working on defining the data elements needed to support those processes.  We avoided the risk of thinking about formative assessment as a thing, a "kind of test", and focused on the process of teaching and learning.  


Formative assessment is a process by which teachers and students use data to inform:
– where they need to go,
– where they are, and
– how to close the gap.


Formative assessment content specialists Margaret Heritage and Susan M. Brookhart help us refine the process model based on research finding and promising practices.  Organizations like the Innosight Institute helped us check assumptions about formative data needed to support various blended learning models. We worked with projects such as the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), Open Badges, Race to the Top Assessment consortia (RTTA), SLC, EdFi, and the Learning Registry (LR) to ensure these implementation-oriented projects will have compatibility with the common vocabulary for education data that will be defined in CEDS v3.

See the slides here.

The Bridge Between Data Standards and Learning Standards—Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Common Education Data Standards (CEDS)

Last week I co-presented at STATS-DC about the work that is being done to bridge gaps between data standards and learning standards.  Maureen Wentworth of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and Greg Grossmeier of Creative Commons joined me to discuss the collaboration between many initiatives including the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative led by CCSSO and the National Governors Association (NGA), Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) led by  IES/NCES under the U.S. Department of Education, and Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) led by the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons.


The presentation slides are here.