Welcome to SRI Internationals Integrative Performance Assessments in Technology (IPAT)
Welcome to SRI International's Integrative Performance Assessments in Technology (IPAT)
If you are a middle school teacher, school administrator, or evaluator interested
Welcome to SRI Internationals Integrative Performance Assessments in Technology (IPAT)
Welcome to SRI International's Integrative Performance Assessments in Technology (IPAT)
If you are a middle school teacher, school administrator, or evaluator interested in assessing how proficient your students are in using computer-based technology to carry out complex reasoning and communication tasks, this site may be of interest to you. It provides two pilot-tested assessment project-based tasks that you can administer to them: Choose a City and EPA Phoenix.
Both present a realistic problem to solve, send students to the Web to do research, then have them write a culminating expository composition for which they make evidence-based recommendations. In Choose a City, the students research about the quality of life in two particular cities -- Fort Collins, Colorado and Knoxville, Tennessee. In EPA Phoenix, they research about air quality and weather in Phoenix, Arizona. Neither task requires much prior knowledge, though Choose a City is rooted in social studies and EPA Phoenix in science. Each takes approximately two hours, but the time can be split into multiple sessions. Single students or pairs of students can do the assessment. Both were piloted mostly with pairs. There are places for two names on the student forms.
Both assessments contain sets of items and are divided into two sections. The first section consists of information-gathering items. The second section contains one final item (Item 5 on Choose a City and Item 17 on EPA Phoenix), which requires students to write culminating compositions. For the first section, you can print out the assessment forms and have your students answer the items in paper and pencil, or you can have the students fill out the forms online. (The forms are in Adobe Acrobat Reader PDF format. If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat Reader software which allows you to open the forms, you may download it from Adobe's web site, free of charge.)The advantage of online administration is that you will be able to generate reports which confidentially display your students' answers.
For the culminating composition, your students create a letter or presentation using a productivity tool (e.g., word processing or presentation software) that is available on their computers and that you choose based on what they have experience using. (IPAT does not provide the productivity tool software). You save the culminating compositions to a local place for your eventual scoring. NOTE: Unlike the responses to items in Section A, the culminating compositions cannot be submitted to IPAT for report-generating.
To score an assessment, you may use a "generic" rubric or a longer set of item-by-item "detailed" rubrics. Both are provided here, along with forms for entering and aggregating the scores. For detailed scoring, there are scoring guides which contain the item-by-item rubrics and examples of student work.
Click the links to the two assessments to browse the student forms and scoring resources, or click the Site Tour for an overview of the IPAT Web site. Click the Alignment tab to learn which items on the assessments align with which National Educational Technology Standards. Click IPAT Online if you want your students to take an assessment online.