Public school students fail for many reasons. Some learn differently than the majority of students in the class. Others need more time and can’t keep up. Another group has behavior or discipline problems that interfere with learning, theirs and others in class. No matter what the reason, educators know that once a student falls behind and fails it’s quite difficult to reintegrate him or her into the classroom.

Understanding this challenge clearly, Chris Sherman, coordinator of the online academy for the El Paso (Texas) Independent School District, decided to try a different approach. Rather than having already overworked teachers try to spend more time with these challenging students, he decided to provide them with an opportunity to take remedial courses outside the classroom, either before or after school, in the subjects in which they are failing.

“Let’s say a student fails a lesson or a section of a math class; he just wasn’t understanding a concept,” Sherman said. “That student will have difficulty going on, because future lessons are based on the assumption that the student has mastered this concept. Immediate intervention is critical, and it is important to do it without stealing valuable time from the regular classroom.”

By creating what the El Paso schools are calling the Online Academy, an academic safety net has been provided for the students. Students who are failing can enroll in online courses, taking interactive lessons about the material that they didn’t master in the classroom. Once the concepts have been mastered, teachers can adjust a student’s grade to reflect the student’s progress. The goal is simple: if students want to pass they can pass. Currently the academy offers English courses, algebra, physical science, chemistry, and world geography.

The computer skills of these failing students are often minimal. Therefore, the first activity is to introduce students to the tools they’ll be using. Sherman has created an interactive lesson that simulates the learning environment. A flash lesson walks them through how to log in, what screens they’ll see when they get there, what a typical test will look like, and what button they’ll click on when they’re finished.

Many do well in the online environment though some don’t. Those who do well enjoy being able to work at their own pace, to review the material as often as they need to and to work interactively.

Tests that students take when completing a course unit must, of course, still be graded. Sherman realized that in order to not bog teachers down with this extra work the academy would need a computerized testing and reporting system. He decided to use Questionmark Perception to assess how students were doing.

“It meets all our assessment needs,” Sherman commented “It’s seamless for the kids. They connect to Perception through a link right in the program. They click on it and it launches the test.”

Since Perception’s randomizing function allows the schools to vary the questions on each test, the academy has created a database of hundreds of questions. Making each test different minimizes cheating. Teachers also monitor the tests.

The teachers also like the grade book feature that enables them to view and calculate final grades based on several assessments. This report includes the ability to weight individual test scores so they contribute more or less to the final grade.“

We use Perception for Web Quests, essay writing, reading guides, and multiple-choice tests,” Sherman said. Sherman also uses Perception to create what he calls video guides, in which students view a film or video and then answer questions about it. The program makes it possible for students to view streaming video in one portion of the screen and answer questions about it on another portion, simultaneously. If the students get behind they can pause the video, finish answering the question, and then push “play” to continue

The project sparked off such enthusiasm that the European Union granted an extension to translate the basic database to French and German. “The fact that the Question Mark products are available in so many different languages naturally made our task a lot easier," comments Mimero. “Besides that, the cooperation with the Question Mark people was optimal: they put in a lot of know-how into the development of the tests and were always open for our suggestions. That's why we're now enlarging the question database with two new libraries for knowledge level 3: one for analytical and one for an organic chemistry. It will in the long term contain a total of 2400 questions."

The ECTN-project group also developed a ‘Demonstrator’ (a smaller version of the basic database, containing 110 questions). From this database also, a random test of 30 questions each was compiled. The user can take the test in up to 10 European languages, and the installation program can even add extra Greek or Central-European fonts.

Says an enthusiastic Mimero: “In the meantime the Demonstrator already exists in 12 languages, and there are still two more under development. We already have a Polish and a Czech version of the Demonstrator. There is a lot of speculation and animated discussion about the particularities of chemistry education in the different European countries. "‘Evaluation of Core Chemistry’ does in that way really contribute to an increase in our chemistry knowledge. Without Question Mark we would never have been able to accomplish this in such a short time span.”

You can find more information on the project 'Evaluation of Core Chemistry' at http://www.cpe.fr/ectn.