Project Highlights

In 2014, the GED Testing Service in a joint venture with the American Council on Education, announced the implementation of a new General Education Development (GED®) assessment. The new GED test is to be administered via electronic devices, mostly desktop computers, to replace paper-and-pencil examination. The implications of the change involve all institutions that prepare adults to take the GED test are now required to provide practice tests electronically. That means that GED Instructors and the leadership of Adult Basic Education organizations have to implement technology in their GED programs.

I was hired to train GED Instructors on how to teach and GED students the necessary skills required to successfuly use technology to take the GED® test, and to demonstrate the use of the new GED 2014 test interface and required hardware.

The main purpose of the training is for GED Istructors to be able to receive answers to their most common questions around the new delivery method. After several surveys, the most commonly asked questions were:

• How will essay and editing passages questions will be scored?


• How can I teach students to use a technology that I don't know?


• What can I do if I don't have access to the required calculator?


• How do I implement techology in lesson plans on reading and arithmetic?


• What technology devices should the students use to practice?

Based on the needs assessment surveys, I created an outlines of topics for the GED 2014 Workshop. The outline was presented to the Program Directors for approval. Then I created the workshop based on the 2014 GED® Test Technical Manual. I also used the demos provided by the GED Testing Service website. The workshop sessions are divided in three major areas: hardware, software/UX/UI, and technology implementation in Adult literacy.

I made sure that I included an overview of Athena, the computer-based delivery system that the GED Testing Service uses for scoring, along with resources for Instructors from the GED Testing Service.

A Constructivist Approach

Rather than "Death by PowerPoint", or any kind of lecture or rote learning event, I decided to use a constructivist approach to learning in the workshop. Presenting the workshop as a community of practice, where all learners bring their own expertise and experiences, and add the content to their own communities and professional lives is the perfect approach to the nature of the audience. GED Instructors are masterful at learner-centered approaches. Being that the intended audience are adult education professionals, a constructivist approach (Crook and Sutherland, 2017) aligns well with imparting new information and skills that they can discover afresh theough their own exploratory actions. Each slide of the presentation is a conversation starter, where the audience uses metacognition to integrate the new ideas to build new technology skills, monitor their progress, and integrate or adopt new strategies as their knowledge and skills grow (Winne and Azevedo, 2014).