In
“Can you tell me if I’m OK?” said Britton, from her seat behind a computer in a science lab at the school on Friday morning.
Flateau took the opportunity to urge Britton to use her own problem-solving skills.
“If you don’t get it right the first time, what’s going to happen?” he said.
“I fail,” said Britton.
“You try again,” Flateau, who is an energetic 35, corrected her.
This exchange took place as Britton and seven classmates worked their way through an evaluation requiring them to design their own experiments to test the effects of sulfuric acid, a component of acid rain, on natural and manmade objects.
Through a waiver from the federal Department of Education, Woodsville teachers are working to develop evaluation tools to use in place of state standardized tests. SAU 23 is a participant in the state’s Performance Assessment of Competency Education program, a voluntary initiative that first began as a pilot in 2012, and aims to recognize mastery of certain skills, rather than time spent in a seat or scores on a test.
For now, Woodsville students are still taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests mandated by the state Department of Education. But standardized tests take time away from instruction and they do not encourage teachers to be creative in their lesson planning, SAU 23 Superintendent Laurie Melanson said in an interview last fall.
Melanson, who became superintendent in July, inherited Woodsville’s participation in the initiative from her predecessor, but she is an eager supporter; glad to replace computerized state testing — “which,” she said, “has questionable value” — with performance-based evaluations like Flateau’s.
Change isn’t easy, and it requires more effort on the part of teachers and students, she said.
“It’s easy to turn on a computer,” she said.
Instead of sitting down for a test at the end of the unit, students are evaluated as they go. For each step, students suggest and Flateau confirms their grades — excellent (100 percent), good (87 percent), satisfactory (71 percent) or competency not achieved (no grade). Eventually, Flateau hopes to move away from grades altogether, he said.
This performance-based evaluation better mirrors the way they will solve problems in a workplace, Flateau said. In the old days, students would have memorized formulas for how different chemicals interact, but now such information is easy to find online.
“Memorizing facts doesn’t help them in the real world,” he said.
Instead, this method of evaluating students’ progress helps them to learn and demonstrate what they know at the same time. The project is student-directed, which allows them to go at their own pace.
On Friday, Flateau bounced around the room — “like a hummingbird,” he said — answering students’ questions and guiding them to the resources they’ll need.
“We have to construct the whole experiment by ourselves,” said student Astra Sleeper. “It’s harder and more challenging” than taking a test.
Seated at a computer next to Sleeper, her fellow freshman Emma Restelli said the act of designing and performing an experiment is more engaging than a test would be.
“It’s more hands-on, so we learn it better,” she said.
At a workbench, Isaac Frost used a scale to measure the mass of a stick, a leaf and some soil, which at a future date he would coat in sulfuric acid to see what happens.
Like his classmates, Frost also said he enjoys the hands-on aspect of the assignment.
“I like it this way because, for one, we get to do the actual experiment,” he said.
Frost had already gone through the first few steps Flateau laid out in a Google document online, including describing the properties of sulfur dioxide and the process of combining it with oxygen and water vapor to create sulfuric acid.
Though memorization isn’t the point of the assignment, the exercise seemed to be helping new information to lodge in students’ minds.
“As it went on, I started remembering” the equation, Frost said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
