Currently, CRESST and the Educational Testing Service are co-developing a series of assessments to serve as Interventions for Struggling Adolescent and Adult Readers and Writers. The assessments, combined with guidelines and a web-based score reporting tool, will provide critical resources for teachers to meet the language learning needs of their students. Included in the CRESST work are: test specifications for the assessment; framework on the use of the proposed assessment for formative purposes; research instrument development as necessary; computerized score reporting; and training and implementation that supports the assessment system.

CRESST is also conducting an exploratory study on providing teachers with clear performance descriptors and formative action suggestions. Funding is from a four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences.

For more information, please contact:
Margaret Heritage, Ph.D., Assistant Director for Professional Development
Phone: 310-794-5680 | Email: mheritag@ucla.edu

In the Armory Center for the Arts Evaluation, CRESST is integrating both quantitative and qualitative data to investigate the impact of the art center's professional development program. The evaluation team is measuring the impact of program participation on teacher knowledge, attitudes, efficacy, and practice in arts-based instruction. Other questions include whether the program has an impact on student learning outcomes and the relationship of teacher implementation to those outcomes. The evaluation has both formative and summative purposes, with opportunities for the administrators to review evaluation results and make program refinements throughout the evaluation process.

For more information, please contact:
Noelle Griffin, Ph.D., Associate Director
Phone: 310-825-8605 | Email: griffin@cse.ucla.edu

Developed with funding provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Office of Naval Research, the Ontological Relations Builder (ORB) is designed to create, explore, store, compute, visualize, and communicate information. Using ontologies, the ORB stores information about items or entities as well as relations between each. Items or entities may range from something as simple as labels identifying objects or people, to knowledge, skills, attitudes, concepts, standards, and assessments. Relations may be taxonomic or may describe dependencies or system-calculated similarities. Using data-mining algorithms, ontolgy creation can be done manually or automatically. The ORB design facilitates flexible and consistent modeling of a domain; allowing, for example, the alignment of standards, instruction, and assessment, while supporting the generation of Bayesian nets used in assessment systems like the CAA.

For more information, please contact:
Markus Iseli, Ph.D., Senior Researcher
Phone: 310-206-1723 | Email: iseli@cse.ucla.edu