Thoughts on GED

So I've given a lot of thought to our discussion that we had yesterday regarding GED. I taught GED at Pima Community College in the Continuing Education Department and I taught it in the Arizona prison system where in 1 year I got 13 convicted felons their GED. To my knowledge these men have not re-offended.

My first thought is to establish ourselves as a testing center. Forgive me for recycling my sales experience, but I say this because I operate on the principle of ALWAYS BE TESTING. Testing provides the student and trainer real time feedback on student success. Frequent testing desensitizes the subject from the stress that comes with high stakes testing. Also it is a competency that furthers our reputation as a learning institution.

The problem with GED descends from its dearth of structure. A lot of Continuing Education Adult Students get lost in the malaise. If they don't have a lot of discipline, they invariably fail or give up. That really did not bother College as they got paid either way. For the prison, it was different. They wanted their subjects to succeed. The prisoners have nothing else to do except to go to school. As a matter of fact, the state incentivized the prisoners to complete the program.

I tested my students once a week. They can take the whole test, a specific portion of the test or a practice test. Every time they test, pass or fail, it costs money. The prison always paid. For the college, the student paid. The test has 5 areas: English, Social studies, Science, Math and Civics. We've discussed the civics test. It's only in english. The other 4 tests can be taken in Spanish, which is the only other language they offer. I'm not sure that they offer the test in Haitian Creole or French.

The student takes the test. Pearson administers the test. The test report gives the student feedback on areas that they succeeded or failed. The student can take the test twice, but once they fail a section twice, they have to sit out for 2 to 3 months before they can retake the test. I do not know if that was a prison rule or a Pearson rule, but it was just the way it was in my time.

After review of the test report, the student and the instructor come up with a strategy to attack the test. The science and the social studies tests are basically reading comprehension tests. The English test has a grammar section and a writing section and the writing section. This test takes more time to get the results back. If the student uses paragraphs as opposed to one long paragraph, uses proper grammar, spells most his words correctls and uses TEXT EVIDENCE: it's a guaranteed pass.

The math section gives the students the most trouble due to the anxiety associated with Math. The math section has word problems, fractions, decimals, percents and some algebra in it. They need to solve for x but there isn't a whole lot of quadratic equations in there. The algebra is quite elementary compared to the Florida standards. The student must overcome the internal psychological problems unique to math. Many students do not believe in themselves, internalize failure and associate mistakes as indicative of a defective mind rather than opportunities to learn and try again. Students must believe that they only way they know they are learning is by making mistakes.

I used a excellent online resource that's free. https://support.ebsco.com/LEX/Practica-Integral-para-La-Prueba-GED.pdf

The establishment of a testing facility will require some commitment from our organization. Pearson requires IT, training, legal and financial consideration. The person that supervised me who administered the test couldn't be involved in training the individual student because that created a conflict of interest.

Those are my initial thoughts. Let me know how you want to proceed.