A study of training 7th-grade teachers in scoring the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) in writing and mathematics

Over the last decade Washington State has embarked on the development of a comprehensive school change effort that had, as its primary goal, the improvement of student learning. The Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) were developed in eight content areas which describe what all students should know and be able to do. The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) is the statewide assessment which is used as one way to measure student progress toward meeting the EALRs.;The purpose of any assessment should be to improve student learning, which means it should be integral to the teaching and learning process. This study was designed to investigate the improvement in student learning at the 7th grade level in writing and mathematics following the training of teachers in scoring the WASL. Teachers from the 7th grade level that were trained in 2002 in writing and in mathematics were selected for the study. Two groups were formed in both writing and mathematics. The first group, the trained group, was an aggregate of the students' results associated with all of the teachers that were trained. The comparison group was the rest of the 7th grade students tested in the state. Further analyses using effect size as the statistic was applied to determine whether or not the gains in student achievement were meaningful.;Since teachers agreed to provide subsequent training in their schools following the scoring experience, a survey was conducted to identify the level of professional development the trained teacher provided. A follow-up, or third "group" was formed using the data from schools where a great, or very great extent of professional development was provided by the trained scorer in that school.;A strong alignment was found between the characteristics of research-based effective professional development described in the literature and the training design of the scoring of the WASL. The data gathered revealed a statistically significant and meaningful difference between the achievement of 7 th grade students in schools where teachers had been trained to score the WASL in writing and in mathematics and provided the training to colleagues in their schools.