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.

Data Standards to Support the Formative Assessment Process

Yesterday I had a great meeting with the K-12 stakeholder group directing the development of the Common Education Data Standards.  Version 3 of CEDS (a common vocabulary for P-20 data) will include standard data element definitions to support the formative assessment process.

“Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve student’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes.”(FAST SCASS, 2008, October)

David Weinberger, one of the group's LEA representatives from Yonkers Public Schools, commented after the meeting,
"I am really excited that we are finding ways to include instructionally relevant information into the data standards in ways that are clearly meaningful and important."

I share in David's excitement. The expansion of the data standards will support scientifically proven processes of assessment for learning, using progress data to inform instructional decisions and student learning activities.

It has been a privilege to work with the  K-12 stakeholders, content specialists Susan M. Brookhart and Margaret Heritage, and others, on refining the process model and identifying supporting data elements.

The process model draft, shown below, is based on case studies of models being used successfully in practices, cognitive science/learning sciences research findings, and engineering/control theory.  

The group is identifying supporting data elements and definitions based on concepts from the Formative Assessment for Students and Teachers (FAST) State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS) (2008).  Rather than "reinvent the wheel" the work is coordinated with many other initiatives interested in standard definitions for the types of data used to inform teaching and learning.  The group collaborates with initiatives such as the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), Learning Registry (LR), Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA), EdFi, the Mozilla Foundation's Open Badges, and the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC).  We are also working with CCSSO/NGA partners on the components related to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and with organizations supporting the RTTT assessment consortia looking at more granular competencies "unpacked" from the standards to measure learner progress.

The emerging standards for data related to the formative assessment process includes use cases across traditional classroom-based models, blended learning models, and virtual learning models. It will create a  common vocabulary for describing data that most directly supports student learning.