In recent years, through professional development programs such as Intel® Teach to the Future, teachers around the world have been learning to incorporate more student-centered approaches into instruction. They have integrated more project-based learning. They have employed technology as an educational tool within the scope of these projects and other learning. They have worked more diligently to develop lessons that encourage students to develop higher-order thinking skills, including critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity.

But feedback from instructors on every continent indicates that there is still a divide between these instructional approaches and assessments, primarily due to the difficulty of testing or measuring skills that extend beyond the mere memorization of facts.

To address this problem and meet the needs of educators, Intel has developed a new online resource to help teachers better assess complex skills.

"Teachers are expected to teach 21st century skills," said Jim Pollard, Intel's Interactive Content Manager, "but they're always very difficult to measure. So we wanted to give them great examples to measure things like creativity or problem solving. We decided to bring together a database of all those assessments and build a tool around the database so that teachers could modify and make the assessments their own."

Thus, Intel's new Assessing Projects resource was born.

Aligned with Learning Goals
"The Assessing Projects resource of the Intel® Innovation in Education Web site will aid teachers in the development of more effective assessments that align with the learning goals in their technology-enhanced units," Pollard describes in a summary of the project. "The resource will support teachers in implementing student-centered assessment practices, and creating rubrics and scoring guides to assess the difficult-to-measure skills and behaviors that are expressed in higher-order thinking. Teachers will have access to assessment items that have been developed by experts, and they will have the ability to modify those items to meet the needs of a particular project and to add their own content."

International Pilot
To develop the resource, Anne Batey, Intel Innovation in Education K-12 Curriculum Manager responsible for the resource content, gathered a group of education specialists from around the globe to conduct multi country pilots of an Assessing Projects prototype. Heather Harley from Australia, Agnes Nathan from India, Ratan Salem from Pakistan, and Gerald Roos from South Africa joined a team of U.S. teachers for training on the prototype in October 2005. They returned to set up local pilots with teachers in their countries, gathering feedback and classroom-tested strategies to be integrated into the final product. "This global development approach has worked very well, and ensures that Assessing Projects will be relevant for the 35+ countries involved in Intel® Teach to the Future," Bailey reports.

To build a prototype of the resource, Intel Innovation in Education staff enlisted the help of the Advanced Learning Technologies in Education Consortia at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (ALTEC) and High Plains Regional Technology Education Center (RTEC) to act as co-designer on the project.

The prototype was loosely based on an existing assessment tool called RubiStar, previously developed by ALTEC. "Assessing Projects uses some of the aspects of RubiStar," said Pollard, "but adds other assessment types, a library of exemplary assessments, and other features that our team and ALTEC thought would significantly improve the tool."

The result is an extensive database of assessment material, including an array of rubrics for measuring 21st century skills, tools for creating and storing additional rubrics or scoring guides, and information and support to assist teachers in developing useful assessments and integrating them into their practice.

Detailed rubrics, prepared by assessment specialists on the development team, are catalogued by grade level (K-12) and subject (Arts, Language Arts, Visual and Performing Arts, Math, Science, Health and PE, Music, Social Studies, and Foreign Language). Additionally, the rubrics are further broken down by categories of Thinking Skills, Processes, and Products/Performances.

Thinking Skills include critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Processes include collaboration, teamwork, self-direction/self-management, self-evaluation, communication, peer review, writing, reading, and research. Products/Performances include brochures, newsletters, multimedia presentations, videos, Web pages, timelines, reports, constructions, essays, persuasive speaking, oral presentations, lab processes, skills demonstrations, artistic or creative performances, and simulations.

Detailed Rubrics
So, for example, a middle-school social studies teacher who assigns students the task of preparing a multimedia presentation can go to the Assessing Projects site, input grade level, subject, and general assignment (multimedia presentation), and pull up a detailed rubric on how to assess student work. The rubric developed for such an assignment identifies topics for assessment, including knowledge of the subject matter, the style and quality of the writing, graphics, slide design (or effective use of slides in the scope of the presentation), use of a planning scaffold or storyboard (in the preparation stage), appropriate use of text in the presentation, and quality of the content. In each of these assessment topics, four available numeric scores are clearly defined by skill level so that the teacher can easily determine at which point along the spectrum the student work falls, and assign the appropriate score.

A middle-school language arts instructor can pull up a similarly detailed rubric for an oral presentation, or a variety of checklists for different genres of writing. For instance, the Narrative Writing Checklist includes a page-and-a-half of elements necessary in good narrative writing, from "My story has a theme that appears throughout the story," to "If I do break conventions, I do it for good reason to add meaning and realism to the story."

Clearly defined rubrics such as these not only make the job of student assessment easier and more accurate for teachers, but they also set clear expectations for students.

Additional information on the Assessing Projects site addresses topics such as how teachers can most effectively use assessment to improve students' acquisition of 21st century skills, when and how to use different types of assessment, how to involve students in the assessment process, and how technology can be used to support assessment practices.

Approximately 20 teachers from countries participating in the development of the new assessment resource tested the prototype this past fall.

Teacher feedback has been "very positive," reports Pollard. "They like the assessments. They find the 21st century skill rubrics really helpful." Additionally, teacher feedback helped developers work out some of the initial bugs when navigating the site.

The new resource will be included in existing and future Intel® Teach to the Future training. Additionally, the resource is available online to any teacher who uses student-centered approaches and wants to assess students based on open-ended products, performances, or behaviors instead of, or in addition to, retention of facts and procedures.

Although, for development purposes, the prototype was tested only in English-speaking countries, the resource will eventually be translated and adapted as necessary for global use.