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Teachers go on secret mission They helped create CIM test questions, but don't ask what they were By DAMIAN MANN Thirty-one Jackson County teachers recently went on a top-secret assignment. Sequestered at a high school in Beaverton for a week, they helped devise many of the questions that will show up on future state assessment tests. Altogether, more than 400 Oregon teachers volunteered for the recent workshop, agreeing not to breathe a word about the questions or answers. "The mission wasn't secret, but the results were secret," said Sally Killen, English Department coordinator at Hedrick Middle School. If teachers were caught leaking anything out, they could lose their licenses and be forced to pay costs for the $400,000 workshop. After hearing about this penalty, Killen said, "My immediate reaction was to take this thing seriously and to watch what I'm saying." After her return, she said one school administrator was curious about the questions. "When I told her about the confidentiality, she backed right off," said Killen. But, apart from this bit of drama, the mood at the workshop was casual, and teachers learned as much as they contributed. "It's going to be an advantage for the kids to have teachers who have an understanding of the expectations from the state of the kind of questions we're going to be looking at," said Killen. The Oregon Department of Education does encourage the teachers to spread the word about how the questions were created, she said. This should help other Jackson County teachers as they work to improve CIM (certificate of initial mastery) test scores in the future. Questions and answers for the multiple-choice tests were for subject areas such as reading, social science, mathematics and science. Hedrick teacher Julie Hill said, "Ironically enough, the right answers were easy to come up with, but the three false ones were harder because they had to sound plausible." Questions ranged from calculating the number of miles traveled on a vacation to figuring out whether a passage was fiction or nonfiction. Every teacher was required to come up with 75 to 90 questions during the week, Hill said. These questions were then reviewed and edited. "These questions won't be used for a year or another two years," she said. "They have a pretty extensive review process." Substitute teacher Bernadette Weigand, of Phoenix, worked on rewriting questions and answers to make them easier for English language learners to understand. "We eliminated all of the superfluous language that would trip up somebody," she said. "But it was not modified to the point of dumbing down. We just put it in plain English." But she said the process was sometimes lengthy trying to create a question that was easy to understand. "We had some really difficult questions to work with." Weigand feels it is better having Oregon teachers devise the test questions, rather than some anonymous company. "It makes the tests so much richer," she said. Oregon is one of the few states in the country to let its own teachers take part in the creation of the assessments. Reach reporter Damian Mann at 776-4476, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.