Current Assessment Theory and Best Practice

Houston Independent School District : Westbury High School

Houston Independent School District is the largest district in Texas and the seventh largest in the United States (About HISD . HISD is known as a model for other urban districts largely due to bilingual education for Hispanic students and for magnet program that allows specialized education to well performing students . Westbury High School is one of the top performing in HISD . Being member of Essential School Magnet Program , The Coalition of Essential Schools , Schools for a New Society , a network of High Schools in HISM

that qualify for the Carnegie /Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , Westbury High School presents multiple opportunities for its ' students to receive quality education and allows specialization within any one of the seven Small Learning Communities : Science and Engineering , Humanities International , Health Sciences , Fine Arts , Communication , Business Carriers , Auto Tech Academies . Aside from this , Westbury High School has Advance Placement , Choir , Business Education , Year Book , and other educational programs available for students (School Information . The school has low drop out rates and emphasizes the current trends in education that are typical for high tech environment to be faced by students upon graduation in the twenty-first century

Westbury High School : Curriculum

Curriculum in Westbury High School is designed in accordance with TEKS objectives , following the guidelines established by the project CLEAR (Clearly Defining Excellence . The blueprint for curriculum design in the High School is alignment of curriculum , assessment strategies used and instructions given out by a teacher . Finally , curriculum design considers similarities across different subjects to maximize efficiency of the learning process . Curriculum stands for a general plan of what students must be able to do and what to know . Westbury High School curriculum is based on the mandatory curriculum Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills commonly referred to as TEKS . Curriculum designed under TEKS program takes into consideration national trends , state and district goals and requirements . Curriculum is designed in such a manner so that logical organization of students ' knowledge is stimulated . While TEKS program establishes goals and offers advice on the ways for teachers to deliver information students and arrange assessment programs , still , the sequence of instructions and instructions deliver format is left to the teacher . When designing the curriculum , teachers use the four columns of the Required Objectives and Correlations . The first column indicates the subject and the objective students are to achieve , objectives are numbered in accordance with HISD TEKS program The second column contains TEKS objective that is most closely related to HISD and is , generally , more narrow . The third column is related to student expectations and states what exactly a student should be able demonstrate . The final column refers to the standardized assessment tools within the HISD program including specific assessment instruments that are most related to the specific objectives established (Clearly Defining Excellence

Project TEKS has been established in the years 1998-1999 . Since then , a number of issues have been raised regarding efficiency of this project Project CLEAR was introduced as a way to...