Area School Scores Hit Highs, Lows : Education: Portfolios of work are being tested as a way of providing additional insight into students’ learning.

Starting this year, the California Learning Assessment System tests will begin including the most basic evaluation of students’ abilities: classroom work.

Nine elementary schools and six middle schools in the state are field-testing a portfolio project in which students submit up to 10 pieces of regular schoolwork in math and language arts. Those portfolios will be submitted at the end of the school year. The program eventually is expected to include all schools, adding portfolios in history and science.

“How do you measure a mind?” asked Joy Jones, a fifth-grade teacher at Van Gogh Street Elementary School and a member of the Los Angeles team that is developing the program.

“Portfolios allow you to value a child, not a test. They show us different kinds of thought processes and the complexity of children’s minds.”

Teams of teachers from Van Gogh in Granada Hills and Ivanhoe Elementary in Los Angeles are among 60 instructors statewide who are wading through the problems of trying to develop a program that rewards student individuality and yet is standard enough to be reliable and fair.

The goal, said Bill Thomas, the director of the portfolio assessment project, is as much to drive changes in curriculum as it is to showcase student development and depth of skills.

“Multiple choice testing leads to multiple choice teaching,” Thomas said. “It leads kids and teachers to value isolated facts for their own sake.

“You can’t develop this type of (portfolio) without thinking, and therefore teachers need to work with kids in a way that values the processes of thinking as well as the product of it.”

At Ivanhoe, Principal Don Brath said both kinds of assessments can give parents and teachers telling examples.

In multiple choice tests, he said, students’ knowledge of the rules of capitalization was gauged by giving students a sentence and asking them to choose which rule, such as capitalization, was not followed.

But with portfolios, by looking at classwork that shows a student’s depth of thought, a grader can see how a student uses capitalization and integrates those rules into a larger writing assignment, Brath said.

Pam Aschbacher, an expert in student assessments at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evaluation, said a well-planned portfolio program can offer insight into more than just a child’s abilities.

“Portfolios can give us a window on what kids are doing,” Aschbacher said. “It can also give us a window on what kids are being asked to do. We can find out, for example, that they may not be being asked to do the things we really think they should be learning how to do.”

Field-testers still are working out several details.

Although non-English-speaking students will be allowed to submit work in their primary language, teams are grappling with a system for evaluating the progress of limited-English speakers, Jones said. There is a question of uniformity, as well, both in how students will be instructed to select their portfolio materials and how they will be judged.

Field-testers are also trying out cover sheets that students will attach to each piece in their portfolios. The sheets ask students to fill out what they learned from an assignment and why they chose to include a particular sample.

A student’s answers, Jones said, can offer even more clues into thought development.

“I truly value the thinking of children and I really think the portfolios show that these are thinking little people,” Jones said.

“Perhaps one day we can do away with the state’s other kind of testing and take a look at what children are really doing.”

County Rankings Here is how schools in selected counties rank among the state’s 58 counties, based on percentage of students who scored in the top three levels of the California Learning Assessment System.

MATH 4TH GRADE 8TH 10TH Los Angeles 35 40 40 Orange 8 13 4 Riverside 44 44 43 San Bernardino 48 43 45 Santa Barbara 12 11 18 Ventura 9 25 25

READING 4TH GRADE 8TH 10TH Los Angeles 32 44 31 Orange 4 7 4 Riverside 36 36 32 San Bernardino 42 45 35 Santa Barbara 13 9 22 Ventura 5 14 11

WRITING 4TH GRADE 8TH 10TH Los Angeles 38 44 42 Orange 8 7 5 Riverside 37 37 34 San Bernardino 41 48 29 Santa Barbara 19 26 19 Ventura 9 11 14