Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A major outreach arm of Mississippi State is receiving nearly $5 million to develop a unified program for scoring and reporting statewide career and technical education assessments.
Based at the Research and Curriculum Unit, the new Mississippi Assessment Center will be led by Cindy Morgan, along with principal investigators Denise Sibley and Stephanie King. The RCU is a part of the university's Office of Research
The Mississippi Department of Education will provide the funding through the 2016 school year, said Morgan, the RCU's coordinator of assessment and accountability. "We already are at work to deploy this spring," she added.
Since 2001, the RCU has been contracted to research and develop the state's career and technical assessments. During this time, however, responsibilities for printing, disseminating, scoring, and reporting were contracted separately to Southern Illinois University, Morgan explained.
"Awarding the contract to one center for the complete process will increase efficiency and provide higher quality assistance to Mississippi's career and technical centers," Morgan said. "Since few states have their own standardized, career and technical assessments aligned to a statewide curriculum framework, we are extremely proud to now have the entire process consolidated literally under one roof."
Direct input from Mississippi's educators has enabled the RCU to develop more readable and user-friendly reports necessary to analyze the assessment data, Sibley observed.
"We collaborate frequently with career and technical educators so that we can produce reports they really want and will be able to immediately use," Sibley said. "Based on initial responses, I think we can say they are excited about the changes."
Morgan said the RCU has a long history of working with state educators and industry representatives to develop directly aligned career and technical curricula and assessment items. Staff members also spend considerable time helping their customers interpret the assessment data and develop innovative teaching strategies to improve classroom learning.
RCU director Patti Abraham said a major goal of the new Mississippi Assessment Center "is to grow quickly to a level where we are able to offer both occupation-specific work-place readiness and academic education throughout the state, as well as to other states that don't yet share our capabilities."
ATTN: NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For additional information, contact Drs. Abraham and Morgan, or Ms. Sibley, at 662-325-2510.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.