Instructions: Administering the Assessment
- Schedule at least two hours for your students to take the assessment. The time can be divided into multiple sessions if you are not concerned about students talking about the assessment problems in between sessions.
- Determine if you want to impose a time limit.
- Determine if you want your students to take Section A of the assessment online or offline (for more on this, click Home and read the third and fourth paragraphs. If you decide to administer the assessment online, click IPAT Online to enroll yourself and your students in IPAT's confidential database.)
- Decide whether you want students to use the Level 1 or Level 2 form. Click the Introduction to EPA, then read about the differences between the levels.
- Before students arrive for the assessment, test the links to the Web sites that the students will need to visit to do their research. The links appear in the student forms.
- If the Web sites are down, decide if you want to proceed with alternatives or wait to see if the sites go back up. Click the Introduction to EPA and read about your alternatives (the "If you encounter technical difficulties" section).
- Decide if you want students to work alone or in pairs. It is not advisable to have groups any larger than three work together.
- Decide what productivity software you want your students to use to write their culminating compositions (Item 17). Either word processing or presentation software may be used. Make sure the software is loaded on each computer.
- Students should write their culminating compositions using word processing or presentation software with which they are familiar. Make sure that students have some place which to save their composition, whether a floppy disk, the computer hard drive, or a folder on the school or district network.
- For the culminating composition, make sure that students can use their computers to clip graphics. If their computers do not permit this function, be prepared to tell students to ignore the clip graphics instruction when they come to it on their assessment form.
- When students arrive for the assessment, assign them to computers.
- For offline administration only: hand out the forms and tell students to use pen or pencil to fill them out. When they get to Item #17 they will need to open the word processing or presentation software you've selected for them.
For online administration only:
To have your students take an assessment online, tell them:
- to click the link to the appropriate assessment, located at the top center of this page
- to type their group name and password in the spaces at the top of the assessment form
- that they will be able to click to sites to do their research directly on the assessment form, and that the sites will open in their own windows so that they can look at the form and the research sites at the same time (NOTE: In Internet Explorer, the sites will open above the assessment form; in Netscape, the sites will open behind the form)
- that in order to be able to look at their assessment form and the research sites at the same time, they should resize the windows so that no individual window takes up the whole screen and conceals the other windows
- that they should type their answers into text boxes on the form
- that if they type more than they can see, they should use the up and down arrow keys on their keyboard to change their view
- that, to be careful, they should save the form every few minutes
- that if they return later to the form, they will open it from the folder you created
- that when they complete their work they should click the SUBMIT button on the form. This submits the form to the IPAT database from which you can later get a confidential report showing their responses to all questions other than the culminating composition (NOTES: 1. Their computer needs to be connected to the Internet to submit the form 2.
they must complete their work in one session--the Adobe software will
not save their work for finishing later 3. if you do not care about
getting a report, do not bother submitting)
Note: "Online Administration" means answering Items 1-4 on the computer and submitting responses to the IPAT database.
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