In Their Hands: Handheld Devices Empower Teachers with Assessment Data They Can Put to Immediate Use

AT THE ORANGE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT in Orlando, FL, assessing reading skills among the youngest students used to be quite a process. Relying on rudimentary products such as paper and pencils, the strategy hinged on the bubble sheets administered to students once a year. After scored the exams, they sent them to the district office, where results were scanned, analyzed, and combined to form summary reports. These reports gave information about which students needed extra help, and which subjects were proving to be troublesome. But because the reports took weeks to generate, it was difficult for to use them to better serve the needs of their students. Everything changed with the implementation of a three-year pilot program that kicked off the 2003-2004 school year. District officials, eager to improve their assessment techniques, turned to Wireless Generation (www.wirelessgeneration.com) to find a way to assess students so that could actually do something with their data. Change came in the form of Palm handheld devices (www.palm.com). Teachers used them to record student performance on a series of questions designed to gauge reading skills. According to G. Lee Baldwin, the district's senior director of Accountability, Research. and Assessment, improvements were seen virtually overnight. In the first six months, with now able to respond to the dictates of the data, reading scores rose dramatically. technology has eliminated the drudgery of assessment Baldwin reports. We're assessing our students more accurately, efficiently, and quickly. Orange County is not the first district to recognize the benefits of handheld-based formative assessment in grades K-3, when students are too young to take tests, and assess them through observation. Across the country, other trailblazing school districts are getting in on the action too, downsizing assessment efforts into the palms of teachers hands. This new trend in assessment mixes software with portable hardware in a way that makes evaluating student skills unobtrusive and easy. Teachers give assessments to students one-on-one, and tap or write on the handhelds to record performance. With up-to-the-minute reporting applications, the technology also enables to tabulate overall performance quickly, providing them with a virtually real-time picture on which students need help, where they need it, and how the can help them best. While dozens of software companies sell tools that they describe as formative assessment (see Other Options, left), only a handful of firms sell formative assessment tools specifically for the handheld environment. Two are New York-based Wireless Generation and Tango Software (www.tangosoft-ware.com), a division of Liberty Source in Austin, TX. It's not a fair fight; Wireless Generation plays on the national scale, while Tango controls only a small portion of the Texas market. Still, as both vendors look to grow their market share in the months ahead, the formative assessment industry is emerging as one of the hottest and most exciting areas in educational technology. Handheld-based formative assessment is important in that you are able to set intermittent measures, or benchmarks, that let you adjust your instruction as you go along, says Daniel Garcia, assistant superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Brownsville Independent School District in Brownsville, TX, which uses the solution from Tango. The fact that the [technology] allows you to make immediate corrections/adjustments to instruction and add value by re-teaching as needed ... is a plus. Forming Assessment in K-12 education is nothing new. Summative assessments--benchmark evaluations conducted at the end of an academic year--have been around for years in the form of big, scary exams. On the other hand, formative assessments, tests that monitor student performance throughout a portion of the curriculum (see Formative vs. …