Washington State Skill Standards

For the past year and a half the Northwest Natural Resource Technologies Consortium (NNRTC) has been working on skill standards and assessment of those standards in the natural resource/ environmental arena. This has included five different related technical areas: fisheries, forestry, environmental, natural resource and GIS.

Some explanation of the terms ‘natural resource’ and ‘environmental’ is necessary to clarify how the two areas are different. Numerous community and technical college personnel (members of NNRTC) collaboratively came up with this explanation: ‘Environmental’ refers to more urbanized, "impact" and remediation based concerns, while ‘natural resource’ focuses on rural, resource based, protection aspects of the industry.

A work group representing each of the five areas is developing assessment strategies for the individual areas. Strategies focus on best/proper measurement of the performance criteria developed in the skill standards document. We are utilizing multiple tools with three main strategies:

1) Criteria associated with internship or a work co-op atmosphere;

2) Criteria suited to a portfolio such as might be developed during a learning community or capstone class, and

3) Observed demonstrations of skills and abilities that are recorded as competencies and associated tasks using a bar-code scanner and special software. The document will be ready sometime this summer.

We hope to host a summer institute for development of an articulation plan among high school, community and four-year colleges. School and workforce implementation of the skill standards and assessments will also be addressed.

For more information, contact Claire Denise, NNRTC Coordinator, at (253) 770 –3072.

-Submitted by Don Samuelson and Claire Denise, April 19, 1999