Family Literacy

GED 2002: Are YOU Ready?

*Has your program ordered - or downloaded - your GED 2002 posters? Do you have some for your room? Are there posters up in the main offices?

*Do you know what happens if a student has passed four of the old GED tests and is only two points shy of passing the fifth - and it's January 1, 2002?

*Have you thought about how you will counsel with students who want to start taking tests in November? Or with students who lose credit in 2002 for tests taken in 2001?

*Do you know when your local testing center will stop giving GED tests this year? Has your program made any policies or suggestions about when to stop sending students to take GED tests this year (especially ones who are just starting to take their tests)?

*Do you know about the new scoring rubric for the writing section?

*If you were given an essay to score, would you be able to score it holistically according to the new rubric?

*Do you know that you'll need to use authentic business texts such as memos, letters, reports as you work with students? (These kinds of items will be on the GED 2002.)

*Can you think of other practical documents to use in the GED 2002 class?

*Are you ready to teach "organization" skills?

*Do you have copies of the U. S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the various landmark Supreme Court cases available for your ASE or GED classes?

*Do you know how to incorporate these documents into lessons that require students to analyze and synthesize information?

*Do you know that students may be asked to use higher order thinking skills to make sense of historical photographs in the Social Studies section?

*What about other visual processing skills? Are you ready to teach using maps, graphs, advertisements and other visual items that students are likely to encounter in their everyday lives? And how about political cartoons? The new test will have more of these kinds of items.

*Can you recall the major concepts and trends in history, civics, and government that high school graduates are expected to know? Can you teach these in interesting contextualized ways that are meaningful to students?

*Can you think of ways to incorporate charts, graphs, and tables of science into your lessons?

*Are you ready to facilitate classroom explorations of topics related to health and the environment that are relevant to your students?

*Are you ready to help your students make meaning of various business documents?

*Can you think of some interesting ways to help students learn to compare and contrast information drawn from various real life sources - and then answer questions about the information?

*Can you think of interesting and relevant ways to help students learn how to analyze and synthesize information? (higher order thinking skills)

*Has your program ordered the Casio fx-260 solar calculators for all of the teachers?

*Is your program going to order overhead calculators ($35) for you to use in your classes?

*How will your students get access to the Casio fx-260 solar calculators? (Will there be class sets? Will you have them for sale at cost? Will you find out where in town they can buy these?)

*Do you know how to use these calculators? Do you know how to TEACH using these calculators? Do you know how to teach using the overhead calculators?

*Twenty percent of the math questions will be "open-ended." Are you ready to work with students on these type of questions?

*Are you familiar with the new types of grids that students will use to answer the open-ended questions the new math GED 2002 test?

*Do you recall the principles of basic statistics? Are you ready to prepare lessons about how statistics relates to everyday living?

Victoria Hoffman is Project Director of the Adult Literacy Clearinghouse, a project housed in the Texas Center for Adult Literacy & Learning (TCALL) at Texas A&M University. She used information from the resources listed below to prepare this checklist.