THE 2% ISSUE

Research Assistant: Joyce Wang

1. A modified HSA and a modified MSA.

Both are to be considered for students who need a simplified curriculum. They would consist only of items covering an abbreviated curriculum that is deemed appropriate for up to 2% of the students in order to be termed “proficient” for NCLB purposes. The related research questions of interest are as following:

1) How should we select the questions the students take?

2) How should the results be interpreted?

3) Can the old standards be generalized to the narrowed assessment?

4) How do the Core Learning Goals relate to these questions?

5) What is legitimate to tell parents?

2. Possible supplement(s) to the modified HSA and MSA

This issue comes from a belief that if you take a modified version of the test, you should do something else that supplements the information from the test, before you are eligible to be given a passing score for that test, even if your performance is at a high level. The related research of interest is what the supplement(s) should be. In other words, we want to know what else the students tested with modified materials might do as a substitute for the more extended curriculum that students who take the regular HSA complete.