MEASURING STUDENT PERFORMANCE
All Construction Programs should be designed to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to enter the workforce, or continue their education in a post-secondary institution or both. Thus, the ultimate indicators of student successes are employment, particularly in the student's chosen career field, or continuation of their education in further technical training or continuation in a post-secondary technical or academic institution.
It should be expected that a large percentage of students completing your Construction Program will enroll in a college or university. Thus, many high school students should be dually enrolled at a post-secondary school in their senior year in both technical and academic classes if at all possible. Your Construction Program should track student scores on such tests as COMPASS, ACT, SAT, etc. as well as their success in college. This information should be reviewed by faculty and administrators for possible curriculum instructional strategy and work site experience modification.
For those students working full-time after high school graduation, your Construction teacher(s) should survey within the year both the hiring supervisor and working graduate to determine if there should be changes made in the Program. This can be a mail-out survey or phone interview. Employer satisfaction surveys can be very important ingredients to program improvement.
Your construction curriculum guide provides examples of measuring student's growth in each unit of construction. Remember that we need to be measuring skills, knowledge, and attitudes as each student progresses through the program.
When measuring skills we can use several methods. One is evaluating the "end product" of a student's project. A second evaluation procedure is to evaluate the process by which the student used to completing his/her "end product." Many times instructors use a combination of both when measuring the growth of a student at the end of a unit.
REMEMBER that one of out biggest jobs in technical education is to teach students how to evaluate their own project or work unit. Students must be able to know on their own how to measure the quality and quantity of their work.
Please don't forget that "self-evaluation" is the highest form of evaluation.