Background on Design of the Toolkit Materials

As part of our work with CAESL, we conducted a needs assessment survey with a cross-section of potential audiences, including hundreds of parents, as well as teachers and school administrators. This survey input helped guide the initial development of the tools on this website. We asked parents what they wanted to know about educational issues. We asked them what might be the best and most time-efficient ways to engage their learning. We asked teachers and school administrators what topics they thought would be important for parents and caregivers to know more about and better understand. We also surveyed the entire group on what topics and questions concerning assessment they considered of most use and interest. The findings helped frame the questions that form the basis for the seven Main Messages about assessment.

What Parents Want to Know
In analyzing survey results about what parents of elementary-grade children wanted to learn in relation to their children's mathematics and science education and how they wanted to learn it, these strong trends emerged:

• Parents are more interested in how they can enable their child's success rather than the specifics of what their children know, don't know, or should know.
• Parents want to be addressed directly as adult learners, to learn from "experts" through information sessions designed for adults, through reading, and through discussion. Time is of the essence.
• Parents are willing to attend more than one session to learn how they can contribute to their child's success, but they are also interested in learning in a variety of other time-efficient, practical ways, such as reading short digests in the school bulletin or articles about the topic sent home with their child.

Field Test
We also field-tested these materials across the country with diverse groups of parents, teachers, administrators, and assessment personnel. In summary, the feedback indicates that: the tools can be effective with participants from a variety of socioeconomic groups (please feel free to modify for your audience); the tone is appropriate for the audience intended (again, modify as appropriate); the views presented on assessment appear to be balanced; the information was relevant to participants; interest in the two-hour sessions was very high. All Toolkit materials are designed to provide parents with concrete and practical things they can do that research has shown to be effective in helping children succeed academically. The materials are also intended to encourage an awareness of complex assessment issues so parents can make their own decisions about policies and practices that affect their children, schools, and communities.