CMT-CAPT Skills Checklist Technical Manual. - NAAC

3. What contributes to understanding of other standards? In other words what are theskills that, once mastered, give a student the ability to use reasoning and thinkingskills to learn and understand other curriculum objectives? 1The Committee worked on the identification and appropriate grade placement of eachobjective. As described in the “dot vote” procedure, Committee members individuallyselected the Expected Performance items and the Content Standards they considered to be"most important" for the population of interest, i.e. students with significant cognitivedisabilities. The selected items were reviewed by the group to establish group consensusbefore the list was finalized.At subsequent item development meetings, the outcomes of the earlier work served as thebasis for a final discussion of the items selected and a finalization of the list. Inparticular, the critical questions posed to the Committee were:1. Do the Content Standards and Expected Performance selected address the full rangeof skills included in the Content Strand, i.e., from the basic knowledge andcomprehension level to the higher order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis andevaluation?2. Are the Content Standards and Expected Performances selected sufficient for theassessment of grade level skills at each grade from Grade 3 to 8, and 10?Two procedures were utilized to validate the results of the Committee’s selection andplacement of the content standards in each curriculum area. The first procedure was anindependent, expert review performed by all of the Language Arts and Mathematicscurriculum consultants at the CSDE. Each curriculum consultant, three in Language Artsand two in Mathematics, worked independently to examine the appropriateness ofdecisions made collectively by the Committee members. The results of the review led toa verification of the selection of the Content Standards and Expected Performance itemscompleted by the Committee.A second procedure compared the Committee-identified standards and performance itemswith those that had been independently identified by an urban district in Connecticutworking with a similar population. This urban district had previously completed its owncontent selection process using a similar theoretical basis 1 and focused on theConnecticut Curriculum Framework. This procedure demonstrated a high degree ofoverlap between the material developed by the district and the Committee.After the completion of both of these procedures, the CSDE considered therecommendations of the Committee to be acceptable to serve as the basis for the secondgeneration of the CTM/CAPT Skills Checklist.1 These three guiding questions are based on research by Douglas Reeves, Chairman of the Center for Performance Assessment. SeeReeves, Douglas B., Making Standards Work, 2004, Center for Performance Assessment, 317 Inverness Way South, Suite 150,Englewood Colorado, 80112 (P.47)xix