Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State is receiving a nearly $1 million grant to develop an alternative statewide system for assessing the educational needs of public school students with disabilities.
The Mississippi Department of Education is providing the funding through the 2009-10 school year to the university's Research and Curriculum Unit and its Mississippi Assessment Center. Specifically, the project will focus on ways to better evaluate the teaching of students with significant cognitive challenges.
"For this project, assessment evidence from Mississippi teachers will be evaluated to document student knowledge and skills in language arts, mathematics and science," explained project leader Cindy Morgan. "We also will be working to establish the reliability of teachers' proficiency ratings of students."
Joining Morgan on the project will be principal investigators Mary Brook and Denise Sibley, as well as numerous collaborative teams of classroom teachers around the state.
Morgan said the RCU also has a contract with the state education department to research, develop, score, and report the state's career and technical assessments for secondary and post-secondary education.
RCU director Patti Abraham said the awarding of this latest grant is "a tremendous boost for the unit's goal to grow the Mississippi Assessment Center quickly to a level where we are able to offer both occupation-specific and academic assessments for the state, as well as to other states."
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For additional information, contact Drs. Abraham and Morgan at 662-325-2510.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.