Taking Educational Assessment Data to the Next Level
What is OSIMS all about?
Several years ago I was hired by the North Clackamas School District in Oregon to help facilitate their assessment tracking efforts. What I didn’t realize then was that I was to be an integral part of a very progressive approach to student assessment in the State of Oregon. While seniors that year were able to prove their abilities on state tests to receive an optional certification on their diplomas, the North Clackamas School District was looking to go one step further by requiring seniors to prove their mastery of material through multiple options and opportunities. Tracking the multitude of options such as state assessments, classroom work samples, third party nationally-normed assessments and classroom credit for thousands of graduates was a daunting task which my manager, Dr. P. Craig Nikolai, recognized as requiring a very customized piece of software.
Times Change
Seven years later, Oregon has officially scrapped the certification model and is instead moving toward a achievement based graduation model where seniors are required to prove their mastery of material through multiple options and opportunities. Suddenly the software Craig and I developed and maintained for the North Clackamas School District over the past seven years is of relevance to a lot more people.
Also during the last several years, schools have become increasingly more sophisticated in the ways in which they use assessment data to track student achievement and inform instruction. A huge amount of professional development centers around strategies enabling teachers to better use assessment data to identify potential gaps in student learning and to track students’ response to teaching techniques. Software to support these strategies often lag behind the assessment and strategies themselves and tend to be limited in their scope.
The data system currently employed by North Clackamas was designed in a bubble, addressing one district’s very specific needs around a very specific set of assessments. As the years have passed, the limitations of that system have become increasingly apparent. Graduation requirements have changed; specific assessments have come, gone, or been modified; teachers’ data needs have increased drastically; support for complicated web delivery particularly javascript has gotten a lot more robust; and data formats have changed and changed and changed again. All of these changes over the years have had me re-imagining the North Clackamas system with the type of clarity that can only be achieved in hindsight. At the same time, it seems only logical to design the system in such a way that it can be useful to other educational institutions as well and to share my experience with others.
The OSIMS project was originally envisioned by Craig Nikolai in 2005 as a continuation of the work he’d begun in North Clackamas. Now, years later, I’m ready to apply the lessons I’ve learned through the last seven years to build a data system which I hope will allow educators to not only to find the answers they seek today, but allow them to answer the questions they’ve not yet even though to ask.