Souhegan High Featured in New Documentary

The work that Souhegan High School faculty members have been doing with performance assessment has not gone unnoticed by the New Hampshire Department of Education.

The state agency has been so impressed with the school's innovative approach, that it wanted the film company 2Revolutions to come out to the school earlier this month and interview several faculty members, according to a press release issued by SAU 39 officials.

Kathy White, the dean of the Souhegan High School faculty, said the school's work with the New Hampshire Performance Assessment Network is the reason why the film crew came out.

She explained the network “aims to engage New Hampshire’s school districts in developing valid and reliable performance assessments to build and measure mastery of competencies in our local and state student assessment systems,” according to the state’s website.

She also said that Souhegan’s work with performance assessment with the Center of Collaborative Education has put Souhegan at the forefront of the Performance Assessment movement nationally.

Besides the documentary, Souhegan was also recently featured in an article on performance assessment by Stanford University researchers, White said. She added that a number of Souhegan faculty are contributing to a national database of performance assessments and also serve as Practitioner Assessment Experts for the state of New Hampshire.

According to the New Hampshire Department of Education’s website, the performance assessment system will include: “a set of common performance assessments that have high technical quality in the core academic subjects; locally designed assessments with guidelines for ensuring high technical quality; regional scoring sessions and local district peer review audits to ensure sound accountability systems and high inter-rater reliability; and a web-based bank of local and common performance assessments.”