Background
The California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) was developed to improve education by tying high school graduation to a standardized measure of competency. Students in the Class of 2006 who failed to pass this exam by the end of the 12th grade were the first to be denied diplomas. As one response, the State Legislature made grants available through the California Community College Chancellor's Office to local Community Colleges to serve this population of students. The Butte-Glenn and Lake Tahoe Community College Districts independently applied for grants. Finding they shared a common vision regarding how students should be served, they entered into a partnership, planting the seed that would become a statewide safety net program, CAHSEE: Stepping Into Your Future.
Delivery model
The CAHSEE: Stepping Into Your Future program is designed as a hybrid model. The on line materials include:
- Online course content built within Moodle, an open source course management system.
- Pre and Post Assessments
- Interactive lessons with career/workforce themes providing 'real world' application
- CCC Confer's web based conferencing tool (Elluminate) which allows the hybrid delivery method for the Math and English Language Arts instructors to interact with students and conduct synchronized learning sessions online.
- 'Mini lecture' video clips created with Camtasia
- Local instructional support and computer/Internet access through local project partners
- User Guide
Student identification, recruitment and support is provided through local partnerships with community colleges, high schools, adult schools, and community based partners (i.e. public libraries and community technology centers) and County offices of education who support participating teachers.
Student evaluation
The program uses a strength based approach to evaluate student progress at every stage.
- An entry survey sets the instructional context by gauging the student's test taking ability, content experiences, and approaches to problem solving.
- Strength based pre assessments allow the instructor to guide the student towards course components that meet their specific needs.
- An ongoing formative assessment, tracks answers to questions and progress towards completion. With this information, Instructors can customize the pace of curriculum, increasing it for some, and slowing it for others.
- Finally, a post-assessment demonstrates the progress each student has made and ultimately determines whether they are ready to attempt the CAHSEE.
MATH Content
The mathematics portion of the CAHSEE: Stepping Into Your Future curriculum includes five discrete math strands with 7 to 8 interactive lessons each. Each lesson includes four levels of instruction; each level building on the next, to ensure our student population retains and is capably of applying math concepts on the exam. The Math strands are presented in 'modules' that include Measurement and Geometry, Algebra and Functions, Statistics, Data Analysis and Probability, Number Sense and Algebra I.
In each lesson, concepts are explained in a real world context. For example, a woman's flower bead is transformed into a demonstration of the formula for the area of a square and a circle. The narrator's voice, along with live images of a woman's garden gives the students intuitive understandings of the concepts tested in the Exit Exam. Next the student takes part in an interactive game, applying the concepts just learned in a fun and engaging format. Next, students are guided through more detailed 'CAHSEE like' problems, which allow them to construct and deconstruct the concepts they just learned. Finally, students are presented with a review prior to taking a comprehensive post assessment.
English Content
Developing a model for successful online English Language Arts preparation traditionally has been difficult for educators. The problem solving techniques needed for Mathematics can be clearly put down on paper, while the processes that lead to proficient reading and writing take place inside the students head. Making those 'hidden' pathways visible was a rewarding challenge for our English Language Arts development team.
The English Language Arts portion of CAHSEE Steps takes students through the subject matter of the Exit Exam in a way that challenges them to think actively about reading, writing, and word meaning. For example, while a video of a young woman discussing reading strategies plays, the text is shown in an adjacent paragraph and synchronized highlighting guides the student reader through the text. In another, a popup journal provides space to reflect and analysis the previous lesson. By the completion of the program, active reading and writing has become second nature. The CAHSEE: Stepping Into Your Future program Includes 3 modules with the standards embedded throughout the interactive lessons. The ELA program is built in modules, Being an Active Reader, Being an Active Writer: Writing an Essay, and Being an Active Reader: Strategies for Analyzing words With Text.
There are 3 lessons in each module and each lesson provides the 'big picture' overview of the lesson, guided and independent practices that use a metacognative discourse feature to demonstrate to the student what it 'looks and sounds' like to employ the strategies described, and a 'think like the test maker' component that connects real world reading to reading in a test taking environment.
