by Emma Shuster ’18

For decades, MCPS has utilized semester exams as a strategy to test the cumulative knowledge of all students at the end of the semester. Starting at the beginning of last year, semester exams were replaced with “Required Quarterly Assessments” (RQAs) with hopes of increasing instructional time in the classroom as well as having a more frequent measure for students to demonstrate their knowledge. Yet after only one year of implementation, Required Quarterly Assessments were replaced this school year with “Progress Checks.”

In a booklet distributed to high school teachers in the county entitled, “The Learning Journey: Ensuring Student Succes,” MCPS elaborated that these Progress Checks were intended to “measure ongoing instruction as well as previously taught standards, including skills in writing in either analysis or argument in response to one or more grade-level texts.” Some teachers, however, are not very dazzled by these new changes.

“The types of county assessments have changed many times over my twenty-four years of service as a MCPS English teacher,” noted English teacher Alexandra Green, who teaches both Honors English 9 and AP Language and Composition. “I have administered criterion reference tests, pre-assessments, formative assessments, semester exams, required quarterly assessments, and now progress checks. Teachers adapt to the changes because the county’s direction aligns with state and national standards,” she explained. “If those standards change, then the direction that the county takes changes too. Assessments are a fluid, and teachers adjust as needed.”

Progress Checks, in the form of standardized in-class assessments in English, are given twice: once at the end of first semester and again in the middle of the third marking period. For those two quarters, students take a standardized test, and for the remaining two quarters, the county requires a common task that counts as a Progress Check. For the first time, common tasks, such as an essay consisting of literary analysis or reading comprehension, are reported to the county. The Progress Checks in the second and third quarter consist of both a reading multiple choice section and a written response, given over the course of two class periods.

The reading comprehension multiple choice items are scanned into a software program called Performance Matters, a program that performs analysis at the student, class, school, and county level. Each teachers is responsible for grading their students’ written responses and submitting the answer sheets for scanning and review. The results of the data may help teachers focus on areas for which students may need improvement.

Since only one Progress Check has been administered so far, it is difficult to gauge the numbers. Green’s three sections of Honors English 9A averaged an 82 percent on the Quarter Two Progress Check this year, above the county average.