Any district, any school can give any test and try to use it to place students in the right place in the math pathway. But you cannot guarantee that those decisions are going to be correct unless you do the rigorous work of developing the assessment and then validating it. Palo Alto wanted those guarantees.
— Scott Firkins
Director of Assessment Content, WestEd
Placement into accelerated mathematics courses can open doors for students, paving the way toward advanced high school coursework, college readiness, and future career opportunities. But ensuring students are placed accurately requires a rigorous, evidence-based approach.
In this episode of the Leading Voices podcast, host Danny Torres talks with Scott Firkins, Director of Assessment Content at WestEd, and leaders from the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, Dr. Guillermo López, Associate Superintendent of Educational Services, and Janine Penney, Manager of Assessment. They discuss how the district collaborated with WestEd to transform its placement process for accelerated mathematics in middle school. The result is a fair and evidence-based mathematics validation process designed to accurately place students in the right course in the mathematics pathway.
Their conversation covers the following topics:
- Why Palo Alto Unified School District sought to redesign its validation assessment
- The role of high-quality assessment development and psychometric validation in the redesign
- How ensuring transparency builds trust within the community
- What early results are revealing about the new process and student readiness and success
Additional Resources
Featured Guests
Dr. Guillermo López
Janine Penney
Scott Firkins
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