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Assessment
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As OSC moves into the world of educational assessment,
we are excited to partner with Strategic Measurement and Evaluation, Inc. (SME). SME is a nationally
recognized company that provides customized assessment design, development, scoring, and reporting services
to urban school districts across the United States. By combining OSC’s proven document processing
capabilities with SME’s assessment development and analysis expertise, we are able to provide unique
assessment solutions tailored to meet the needs of our public and private sector clients.
OSC and SME share a commitment to providing assessment-related services that add value for our clients.
For example, a cornerstone of SME’s approach to working with urban districts is to incorporate local
educators into the assessment development process. SME’s staff regularly trains teachers, principals,
and administrators how to create high-quality assessment materials that meet professional standards
for validity, reliability, and fairness. Once trained, these educators are better prepared to take
meaningful control of local assessments and to understand how to use the resulting data to effect
positive changes in student learning.
Using OSC’s proprietary software as a foundation, SME’s content specialists work directly
with clients to create customized assessments that can include both multiple-choice and
constructed-response items. The scoring of the constructed-response items is accomplished using
OSC’s data capture software. OSC scans the responses and transmits the images to SME’s scoring
centers. SME’s scoring staff is carefully selected based on content background and experience.
SME’s detailed five-step scorer training program ensures the final scored data are accurate and reliable.
For the 2007-2008 school year assessment cycle, OSC and SME teamed to process and score close to 1,000,000
responses to constructed-response items across a number of programs. In every case, the final data
were accurate and delivered on schedule.
Finally, by teaming with SME, OSC is able to offer a full range of sophisticated psychometric
support services to complement our document handling capabilities. These services, once exclusively
associated with large-scale state assessments or commercial assessment products, allow our clients
to present evidence that their locally developed tests meet professional standards. SME’s ability
to apply state-of-the-art equating and scaling solutions to local assessment data increases the
value of the final assessments by allowing districts to monitor student progress in new ways.
From initial test document to final data, the OSC-SME team has the experience and expertise required
to guarantee the success of any assessment project.
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