How can you engage students in high-level learning where they think creatively and critically? How can you incorporate 21st skill building in lessons? How can you provide challenge for gifted students? One powerful way is engaging in product development and differentiating those products to match students’ needs, interests, and abilities. In this digital age, students have a wealth of information at their fingertips; they also have incredible technological tools to package that information. What educators must ensure, however, is that students are able to translate their learning in meaningful, high quality ways. One way to encourage authentic assessment of real-world products is to use a protocol that ensures ease, consistency, and clarity. Developing and Assessing Product (DAP) Tools guide students in product development, facilitate differentiation, simplify assessment, and remove the learning ceiling. With consistent components, an innovative scale, and varying tiers with levels of expectation based on preassessment, the DAP Tool provides one strategy to promote high-level learning. In preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist in a competitive world, 21st century skills prove as important as specific content. Intentional product development taps into those skills – from thinking creatively to communicating clearly, creating media to self-directing learning. When educators use a protocol for assessment that holds children, youth, and young adults to high standards while encouraging creativity and metacognition, those skills are developed so that, as working adults, they are able to contribute products of excellence to their communities and to the world. This session explores four innovations for product assessment; through discussion and samples of DAP Tools and student work, participants will be able to describe common components of all products; explain the need to differentiate when assessing products; and develop original DAP Tools.
Summary :
This session introduces a protocol, the Developing and Assessing Product Tool (DAP Tool), that ensures ease, consistency, and clarity in authentically assessing real-world products. This protocol removes the learning ceiling, assists students in product development, facilitates differentiation, and simplifies assessment. Not only does it embrace the digital age in its many technological products, but it also stresses the importance of content attainment. In today’s world, students have technological tools at their fingertips whether they are creating a pamphlet that persuades businesses to relocate to their city or designing a PowerPoint exploring the plant cell. It is critical that educators are not misled by the look of the product – it must have substance. At the same time, however, the product itself must be held to high standards since professionals use products in the world of work.
Participants will explore the importance of products in relation to student empowerment and authentic assessment as well as a protocol that eases use and differentiation of products. Through multiple examples of kinesthetic, oral, visual, written, and technological DAP Tools; hands-on practice using the tool with real student products; and creation of the tools themselves, participants will gain confidence in their ability to transfer the protocol to their classrooms.
Participants of this session will:
•    learn a protocol for developing and assessing products
•    be able to describe the four consistent components of the DAP Tool
•    practice using the protocol on real student products• create original DAP Tools to use in their classrooms

Author(s): Tracy Inman, (The Center for Gifted Studies at Western Kentucky University, USA), Julia Roberts, (Western Kentucky University, USA)