History of the GED

To date, there have been four generations of GED Tests; the original GED Tests released in 1942, the 1978 series, the 1988 series, and the current series released in 2002. While the academic content areas in which candidates are assessed—English language arts (literature/reading), social studies, science, and mathematics—have not changed, the priorities and assumptions by which proficiency in these areas is assessed have evolved. Since the GED Tests assess academic skills and knowledge typically developed in a four-year program of high school education, it is of utmost importance to the GED Testing Service that the GED Tests continue to evolve as secondary education evolves.

1942 Series

The first generation of tests, developed in 1942, reflected an industrial era, when a high school education was sufficient for many jobs. By the time this series was retired in 1977, more than 40 percent of test-takers took the tests for employment reasons—evidence that this level of education qualified people for many entry-level positions. During this period, 37 percent of test-takers indicated plans for further study. Content knowledge was assessed in a traditional manner. The English test focused on the correctness and effectiveness of expression, while success in social studies, science, and literature depended on interpreting reading material.

1978 Series

By the mid-1970s, the closing cusp of the industrial age, changes in secondary curricula and public attitudes toward education made necessary a review of the GED test specifications. As a result, a second generation of tests was introduced in 1978. This series was characterized by:

• a shift in emphasis from science and social studies reading materials to a separate reading test
• a transition away from recall of facts toward application of conceptual knowledge and evaluation of presented information

These tests retained an emphasis on high school outcomes, but introduced real-life contexts (such as work or home settings) and reading materials (schedules, newspaper articles) relevant to adults.

1988 Series

The release of John Naisbitt’s Megatrends in 1982 characterized a heightened awareness worldwide of the shift from an industrial to an information society—one characterized by a commonplace use of technology, global awareness, and participatory democracy. As these changes affected adults, the GED Testing Service initiated a five-year review that drew on the expertise of professionals from all sectors of adult education. Again affirming the GED Tests’ academic content areas, the panel recommended five changes:

• addition of a direct writing sample (essay)
• an increased emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• an increased reflection of the diverse roles adults play in society
• greater emphasis on understanding the sources of societal change
• an increase in contextual settings relevant to adults

In addition to the changes in the GED Tests, there was also a shift in candidates’ reasons for taking the tests. More than 65 percent of candidates said they are taking the tests for entry into postsecondary education, while 30 percent reported taking the tests for employment reasons.

2002 Series

Today, a high school diploma remains the primary ticket to many entry-level jobs. In many cases, it’s also the prerequisite for advancement in employment, occupational training, and postsecondary education. Change is indeed sweeping education and the workplace. Content standards developed at the national and jurisdictional level form the basis for the changes that are part of the 2002 Series GED Tests. A panel of experts representing the core academic disciplines of English-language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies proposed these changes. In keeping with the focus on adults who use the GED credential to gain entry both to the workplace and to postsecondary education in an information-based society, the panel recommended four enhancements to the current GED Tests.

Identify, organize, plan, and allocate resources
Work with others
Acquire and use information
Understand complex interrelationships
Work with a variety of technologies
The three part-foundation consists of:

“Basic skills,” including reading, writing, listening, speaking, arithmetic, and mathematics
“Thinking skills,” including creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, visualizing, knowing how to learn, and reasoning
“Personal qualities,” such as responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, integrity, and honesty.
The STWA’s interest in the new GED is rooted in several factors:

The GED purports to assess the basic skills and higher-order thinking skills necessary to succeed in the workplace.
The GED is an indispensable credential for high school dropouts seeking to increase their marketability in the workforce.
An increasing number of young people in the STWA’s target population are leaving traditional high school programs to enter GED programs.
Several of the STWA’s partners, such as the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Alternative, Adult, and Continuing Education, and the NYC Department of Employment, are now providing an increased number of GED classes to older adolescents and young adults.
The LAC and the STWA are steadfast in their belief that the most effective way of building basic skills, higher-order thinking skills, workplace readiness, and preparation for higher education is through active learning. The STWA defines active learning as “a term used to describe a variety of student-centered learning strategies and methods that require the learners to take an active role in their own learning process and the teacher to take on a more facilitative rather than lecture-style role. Examples of these are cooperative learning, project-based learning, contextualized learning and applied learning.” The STWA also points out that “research shows that active learning fosters the skills (i.e., SCANS) that are necessary for career success in the modern workplace, i.e., problem solving, research, accessing information, appropriating resources, working well on a team, etc.”

Through discussions with the LAC, the STWA agreed to sponsor a five-day, 35-hour GED Lesson Planning Institute for 20 instructors who teach GED classes specifically targeted to 16–24 year olds. The principal goals of the institute were to:

Introduce participants to promising instructional practices that incorporate active learning methods
Develop model, peer-reviewed GED instructional plans that integrate these approaches
For their efforts, each participant would receive a $300 stipend on submission of their final instructional plan.

Forty practitioners applied for the institute; of those, 23 were accepted. Nineteen began the institute on the first day, and 17 of those completed their final instructional plan. In selecting participants, the LAC tried to create as diverse a group as possible: from new teachers to those with over 20 years of experience; from teachers in short-term, employment-focused programs to those in traditionally structured education programs; from teachers who were already familiar with some of the practices we were planning to introduce to those who were likely to be skeptical of any practice that challenged their classroom authority or control. Participants taught in a wide variety of settings: Department of Education GED programs, a City University of New York adult education program, union-based GED programs, community-based youth or employment programs, and a correctional institution.

The format of the institute was based on the premise that the best way to learn to use active learning methods is to engage in activities that incorporate those methods. During the planning process, the LAC remained aware that the participants in the institute were themselves adult learners. We considered the research in adult education that contends that, to best facilitate adult learning, instruction must be purposeful, transparent, and contextualized in the learners’ real-life interests and needs. This is true whether the adult learners are students in a GED class or instructors in a GED institute. We also took into account research in cognitive science that maintains that adults develop new knowledge, skills, and strategies by engaging in tasks that draw out and build on their existing knowledge and experiences. Placing new knowledge in, and interpreting new knowledge through, existing mental frameworks facilitates the development of new knowledge and expertise.

Based on these assumptions, and after careful review of the promising practices we were planning to introduce, we developed an institute that provided multiple opportunities for participants to:

Share their experiences as learners and teachers
Reflect on those experiences and draw tentative conclusions about learning and teaching
Compare and contrast their conclusions with those drawn from the literature on youth and adult education
Share examples of their own “best practices”
Develop new ideas and practices that integrated their emerging knowledge about the GED test, the 21st century workplace, higher-order thinking skills, and promising practices in youth and adult education into their instruction
Activities included individual exercises such as reflective writing and silent reading, small- and whole-group discussions, cooperative learning activities, individual and small-group presentations, and opportunities to experiment with new ideas and to learn by doing.

Outline of the GED Lesson Planning Institute
The GED Lesson Planning Institute was held in five sessions in April and May of 2002. In preparation for the first session, participants were asked to read the introduction and first chapter of the GEDTS’s report Alignment of National and State Standards, as well as a short piece on “key findings” excerpted from the report’s Executive Summary. The first reading provided background on the history of the GED test; an overview of the standards reform movement of the 1990s; and an explanation of, and rationale for, the effort to redesign the GED test to reflect state and national content standards. By completing the reading in advance, participants arrived at the institute not only with a deeper understanding of the new GED test and the educational reform movement encompassing it, but also with a greater command of the professional educational discourse that shapes their work.

Session one of the institute began with participants introducing themselves by orally completing six statements describing their background, the students they work with, and the most satisfying and challenging aspects of their work. This exercise was invaluable because it provided participants with an opportunity to find commonalities, acknowledge unique challenges, and build a level of trust and familiarity with each other. Much of the remainder of the day was spent exploring four key issues:

Characteristics of positive learning experiences
Differences between the teacher-centered approach to instruction typical of traditional K–12 education and the student-centered approach more prevalent in adult education
Major changes in the new GED test and their implications for instruction
Competencies and skills needed for the 21st-century workplace and their implications for older adolescent and adult education
In examining each of these topics, participants engaged in personal reflection, small-group discussion, and whole-group discussion. They read an excerpt from adult educator Malcolm Knowles’s 1984 work, Andragogy in Action (Jossey-Bass, 1984). They compared Knowles’s distinction between the didactic, “pedagogical” model of youth education and the participatory, “andragogical” model of adult education to their own beliefs about, and approaches to, teaching older adolescents and young adults. They read the Executive Summary of What Work Requires of School: A SCANS Report for America 2000, in order to compare the skills, abilities, and traits that the SCANS report identifies as necessary for success in the workplace to their own experiences as workers. Midway through the first afternoon, the group had generated three lists: the key components and characteristics of positive learning experiences, the instructional implications of the new GED test, and the instructional implications of the SCANS skills and competencies. Not surprisingly, all three lists were compatible. They recommended the adoption of the more participatory, student-centered, active learning models that Knowles would associate with “andragogy,” rather than the didactic, teacher-centered, skill-and-drill models that Knowles would associate with “pedagogy.”

The final set of activities on the first day focused on critical thinking and the new GED test. Participants discussed what critical thinking meant to them and how they promoted it in their instruction. They compared and contrasted their ideas about critical thinking with Bloom’s taxonomy, the six-level hierarchy of cognitive skills developed by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1956. This taxonomy serves as the basis of the higher-order thinking skills embedded in the new GED. In the last exercise, participants read a GED-level text and then worked collaboratively in small groups to develop six questions based on the text, one for each cognitive level of Bloom’s taxonomy.

For session two, participants brought a resource they had found particularly effective in their instruction. They presented their resource in small groups: what it was, who they used it with, what they used it for, when and where they used it, why they used it, and how they used it. The groups then created a comprehensive list that characterized their members’ effective instructional practices. The lists were discussed by the entire group and synthesized into a master list.

The remainder of the second session was spent examining the first promising practice: theme-based, interdisciplinary instruction. Participants read a piece from Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar’s Methods That Matter (Stenhouse, 1998) and then worked in small groups to identify the key components of the practice; the benefits and challenges of integrating the practice into GED instruction; how the challenges might be addressed; and how to re-envision the instructional practices they each described in the day’s first activity to fit the new practice. Participants concluded the second day by sharing their small group’s insights with the entire group.

Session three of the institute took place one week later. In the interim, each participant was assigned a set of readings about one of four additional promising practices: project-based learning, the application of multiple intelligence theory to classroom instruction, small-group activities, and cooperative and collaborative learning. When the institute reconvened, participants broke into small groups based on the practice they had read about in order to engage in the same process of inquiry about the new promising practice as they had used in session two on theme-based, interdisciplinary instruction. After the small-group discussions, representatives from each group gave a presentation on the practice they studied, offering examples of how that practice could be integrated into instruction. The entire group then discussed and generated a list of features common to all the promising practices. They discussed ways the promising practices could promote the positive learning experiences they had identified in the first session and how the practices could better prepare their students for the new GED test and the 21st-century workplace.

The final set of activities in the third session focused on instructional planning. Participants wrote about a lesson that they had taught that was particularly successful, specifying the steps they took in the planning process that they believed contributed to its success. They worked in small groups to identify the elements of a model instructional plan and the questions GED instructors need to ask themselves when planning. Based on these small-group discussions, the whole group worked together to outline the key elements of a model GED instructional plan and to identify guiding questions that would facilitate the instructional planning process. As the session concluded, several participants pointed out that while this was originally billed as a GED Lesson Planning Institute, the promising practices discussed and the format of the instructional plan that was developed lent themselves to multi-session units and projects as well as single, standalone lessons.

Participants were given three weeks between sessions three and four to design instructional plans incorporating at least one of the promising practices that had been examined. When participants returned for the fourth session, they engaged in a formal process of peer review, modeled on the Statewide Peer Review process developed by the New York State Academy for Teaching and Learning. To conduct the reviews, participants worked in groups made up of four members. For each peer review, the group selected a facilitator/recorder and a timekeeper in addition to the presenter. Each peer review followed a uniform 45-minute format that included:

Formal presentation of the entire instructional plan
Uninterrupted positive feedback from group members
Uninterrupted constructive criticism from group members
An opportunity for the presenter to respond to the feedback and criticism and engage in open discussion with group members
Development of concrete action steps for enhancing the quality of the instructional plan
To facilitate the positive feedback and constructive criticism, participants were asked to keep in mind the guiding questions for model GED instructional plans they had articulated in the previous session.

The fifth and final session was held a week later. Participants shared their final instructional plans with members of their peer review group. Each peer review group selected a representative plan to share with the entire group. The instructional plans developed ranged from a single, standalone lesson that used music in order to build reading and writing skills; to several multi-session, interdisciplinary units on topics such as manifest destiny, the Spanish-American War, and the environment; to an entire curriculum on fair trade and globalization. One instructional plan focused on career exploration. Another used the theme of education and the GED itself as a springboard for instruction. Another, designed for a union-sponsored Spanish GED class, incorporated project-based learning in an interdisciplinary lesson focusing on literature.

Evaluation
The GED Lesson Planning Institute had a profound effect on those who participated. The institute provided them with a framework to reflect upon current practice and an opportunity to experiment with new practices. It was both an overview of active learning models and a model of active learning. In the debriefing session and written evaluations at the end of the institute, many participants commented that the formal peer review process was one of the highlights of the five sessions, providing them with the opportunity to receive the type of serious collegial feedback that they seldom receive. As one participant wrote:

The peer review process was fabulous. It was a rare opportunity to have gifted teachers comment on your work. At my place of work there is no space to do that. I feel the process really made me take a look at what I was doing, and try to improve it. I was made accountable for improving it.

In general, written comments focused on the deep and immediate impact the institute had on participants’ attitudes towards their students, their feelings about themselves as teachers, and their classroom instructional practices:

It really did transform and expand my thinking about teaching these populations, thereby increasing my respect for what we are all trying to accomplish with them as teachers and co-learners. I am more open to students’ ideas, and flexibility in the design and implementation of my lessons. I’m also more “multiple intelligences”-minded in my approach and try to be as interdisciplinary in my planning as possible….truly relevant, constructive, and forward-thinking. The skill/drill game is boring for adults and older adolescents. I knew this, yet I was uncertain as to how I could present the material needed to pass the GED with more intensity. Project-based learning and particularly integrated lesson plans are methodologies that enabled me to bridge the gap between boring skills and drills toward intensive, interactive lessons. The institute has greatly impacted my thinking about teaching older adolescents and adults. I now have to look at their situation—where they are coming from—and rightly approach them. Each student is different from the others so I have to handle them in such a way as to help them have good self-esteem. As they are older adolescents, they will be involved in the things concerning them. I am a “facilitator” rather than an “expert.” It has helped me to realize the value of student-directed learning, i.e., using student backgrounds and interests as resources for lessons. I will also emphasize more flexibility with regard to learning styles in my lessons as a result of the Institute.

Finally, the participants noted the ways in which the institute itself modeled the promising practices it introduced:

In every workshop the practices were modeled, i.e., group work (small and then reporting out), collaborative learning and cooperative learning. [The facilitator] used real, concrete material. He pulled on information that we had and allowed us the time and space to share that information. Again, we were affirmed throughout the process. The facilitator’s behavior ideally modeled the promising practices of open-mindedness, flexibility, respect for all learners (their needs, preferences, and styles), and the ability to lead us into meaningful learning experiences without being overbearing or pedagogical. These behaviors, in my opinion, support the development of self-esteem in adult learners.

The Literacy Assistance Center is grateful to the New York Citywide School to Work Alliance for providing the support needed to develop an intensive professional development offering for GED instructors. Through the process of planning and facilitating the institute, we learned a great deal about the new GED test, active learning methods, and the real-life dynamics of GED classrooms serving older adolescents and young adults. As mentioned many times throughout the sessions, all of us are both teachers and learners, and as we teach, we learn.