EDUCATION COMMISSIONER TO VISIT JACKSON, FREDERICKTOWN

Commissioner of Education Robert Bartman will recognize student achievement in two area school districts during visits Friday.

Bartman will visit Gordonville Elementary School and Fredericktown Intermediate School as part of an annual tour conducted in the spring in the state's 10 educational regions.

This year his visits are being made to school districts that recorded the highest percentages of students scoring in upper performance levels on the 1999 Missouri Assessment Program exams.

MAP exams are given annually to evaluate student understanding of educational concepts and topics.

Last year, students in various grade levels were required to take communication arts, math and science exams

Schools earned a spot on one or more of the "Top 10" lists based on the percentage of their students who scored in the two highest achievement levels -- "Proficient" and "Advanced" -- on different portions of the MAP exams. Student achievement on the

MAP exams is rated on a five-step scale. Advanced is the highest possible level, and Proficient is the desired achievement level for all students.

In all, more than 200 schools were recognized for high performance on MAP exams. Gordonville students posted two Top 10 listings on MAP tests, and Fredericktown Intermediate School students earned one Top 10 listing.

"These are examples of individual schools within districts that have done just an outstanding job of preparing students for the MAP," Bartman said. "By distributing these lists, we hope to give other schools an opportunity to see who they are alike that's on the top 10, so they in turn can find out what those schools are doing right."

The benefit of the fairly new MAP exams is that they require students to do more than "fill in the bubbles," the method normally required for multiple choice exams.

Instead, students must apply their knowledge and demonstrate how a problem or question should be answered, which is a better strategy for testing thinking skills, said Bartman.

"Most business people I've talked to actually expect people to apply the knowledge, to work in teams, to be problem-solvers, and that's the kind of efforts we want to reinforce in schools," he said. "I think most teachers believe that that is the right approach to testing."

Missouri has changed its method of testing students several times in the past 20 years.

The performance-based method used in MAP exams appear to be the wave of the future, although Bartman admits the delivery of the tests could change as technology develops.

"Even I can envision that at some point the kind of tests a youngster takes will be on a computer," he said. "It wouldn't surprise me if in 10 or 15 years or so when the testing processes have reached a new level of sophistication, that the kind of test kids take will be a little different, but conceptually it will be the same."