U.S. Plans Exchange Project to Assist in Student Assessment : Education: System will give states access to innovative testing methods used by California and others.

The U.S. Department of Education is setting up a UCLA-based system that will enable much of the country to tap into innovative methods of assessing student performance used by California and other states .

Christopher T. Cross, an assistant secretary of education who heads the department’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement, said Friday he expected the federally funded State Alternative Assessment Exchange “will make it unnecessary for each state to set out into the performance assessment wilderness alone.”

Acknowledging a growing demand for better ways to assess students’ learning, Cross described the exchange project at a two-day national conference to seek alternatives to the much-criticized “fill-in-the-blank” system of standardized testing that has long dominated American education.

The conference was sponsored by the UCLA-based Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, a research consortium that last fall won a $15-million, five-year federal grant to assess the quality of the nation’s schools and to improve ways of measuring student performance.

The research center, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers, will get $150,000 a year to run the exchange.

The drive for better testing has gained impetus from the education reform movement, which began in the mid-1980s and gathered momentum when the nation’s governors met in late 1989 to set national goals for improving education. Some groups have taken the controversial step of calling for some form of national test for high school students.

Traditional multiple-choice-type tests are beginning to be replaced by so-called “performance-based” exams that experts believe do a better job of assessing how well a student writes, thinks or understands the concepts behind instruction. For example, students might be asked to conduct a science experiment rather than fill in blanks in test statements.

The California Assessment Program, administered to the state’s third, sixth, eighth and 12th graders, has been praised as among the most successful efforts to do a better job not only of assessing what students know but also of helping reshape classroom instruction. For example, many schools reported having their students do more writing assignments after composition tasks were added to eighth- and 12th-grade CAP tests.

(CAP testing was canceled for this school year after then-Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed its funding in the face of a worsening state financial picture. Deukmejian’s action was criticized by educators around the country. His successor, Gov. Pete Wilson, has indicated he wants the testing resumed but expanded to include individual students’ marks instead of just school and district scores.)

Other states cited by Cross as being at the forefront of testing reform include Connecticut, Vermont and Maryland.

During the first phase of the project, the exchange will help with legal, political and security issues, and design a classification system for identifying and trading tests and test questions. Cross said this stage is just the beginning “of a series of activities that we have planned to help state officials move their states toward (reaching) the national education goals.”

Participation, which will be voluntary, should help ensure that states will be able to stretch their tight budgets as far as possible in developing their new testing systems, Cross added.

The exchange project represents only one facet of the research center’s work in exploring new ways to evaluate students and their schools, said Eva Baker, co-director of the center.

“We need to look at what the major initiatives are, what technical advances are needed, how we can best work together to advance the state of the art,” Baker said.

Among the issues discussed during the conference were ways of making sure that changing the way students are evaluated also improves the way they learn, designing systems that are equitable for all groups of students and creating tests that assess the quality of the schools as well as the knowledge of students.