Why PAWS

What are PAWS? Why does Wyoming have them? Who are they for?

Here is what my 4th grade, 10 year old son thinks. "I am going to miss PAWS because we had lots of snacks and extra recesses. I'm not going to miss it because we don't have to write and read and all that all day long. We've been doing it about two weeks and it's too long."

In our town all students are on a 4 day school schedule so the last day for the elementary school to have PAWS was yesterday. My two elementary school children came home rejoicing! Every night we would hear the reminder that "We need to get to bed early and eat a good breakfast so we can do good on PAWS." (Gee, don't parents try to do that all the time? I'm amazed at our school's educators that got our children wanting to do good!)

PAWS stands for "Proficiency Assessments for Wyoming Students". That explains Wyoming has PAWS. This testing is for all Wyoming students grades 3-8 and 11. The idea is for individual student's performance in the areas of reading, writing, math and science (varying by grade)are tested and results are available to teachers in about a month so teachers can alter what or how they teach if needed.

According to a PDF file called PAWS_Participation I pulled off the PAWS site, testing is mandatory for all students with makeup dates offered and school's penalized for students not taking the tests. The tests should be embedded in the classrooms as much as possible with multiple choice portions being taken on a computer. The pdf also states, "The PAWS assessment results will be used for school, district, and state accountability purposes. Students take the assessment in one of three ways: the PAWS without accommodations, the PAWS with accommodations, or the PAWS-ALT."

"The schools pause to take PAWS" is the mantra of our local schools.