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March 1990
MANAGING POLICE BASIC TRAINING CURRICULUM
By
Rene A. Browett
Curriculum Manager
Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Academy
Arlington, Virginia
The scenario might go something like the following. It's
test day at the police academy. The recruits have just completed
their first major examination and are anxious to find out how
they performed. The training staff is sequestered in a large
room, seated at long tables covered with stacks of exams in
front of them. Calculators are in clear evidence. The grueling
task of hand grading the exams begins. Question by question,
they trudge through the exam. To validate test questions (to
find out if more than half the class has missed a certain
question), the leader calls out the questions by number to see
how many of the graders have papers in which a student has missed
a specific question. Hands go up, a count is taken, numbers
recorded, calculators figure averages--some right, some wrong.
The process goes on for hours, even days. Meanwhile, the
students wait.
Does this often-repeated scene have to be? No--not if the
recruit curriculum testing-and-evaluation vehicle involves some
computer assistance. Such a system exists at the Northern
Virginia Criminal Justice Academy (NVCJA). The NVCJA basic
training staff has developed a systematic process whereby days of
effort by a training staff are reduced to less than 2 hours using
one or two people.
This article will discuss how a basic police training
curriculum can be quickly and efficiently managed with an
effective, programmatic approach. Using the NVCJA as a case
study, the article will first provide some background about the
academy and then will discuss the hardware, software and the
process involved in managing the basic recruit curriculum.
ACADEMY BACKGROUND
Established in 1965, the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice
Academy provides training for over 25 criminal justice
jurisdictions in the Northern Virginia area. Staffed with 32
full-time employees, the academy has a leadership cadre of six
executives, including the director, all of whom are former police
officers. Along with a permanent support staff, the academy is
augmented with officers from each of the participating
jurisdictions which provide them as instructors on assignment for
up to 3 years. As one of nine regional academies in the State of
Virginia, the academy is governed by a Board of Directors
comprised of the chiefs of police, sheriffs and city/county
managers from the larger participating jurisdictions.
The academy provides both recruit and inservice training for
each of the participating police departments and sheriff's
offices in the region. Consequently, recruit training consists
of subject matter leading to three certifications mandated by the
Commonwealth of Virginia: Basic Law Enforcement, Basic Civil
Process-Court Security, and Basic Jailors. Each year the academy
graduates approximately 300 students after completion of a 14- to
18-week course of instruction.
In order to graduate, each student must successfully
complete all State- and academy-mandated tests and related
requirements. Developed by the Department of Criminal Justice
Services (DCJS) headquartered in Richmond, VA, State-mandated
requirements are commonly known as performance objectives (POs).
These State mandates (POs) are the end result of a formal job
task analysis, commissioned by the department (DCJS), where the
various functions of police officers and sheriffs were
identified. Developed from this study were over 400 performance
objectives which form the basis for State-mandated police
training. Each training academy must teach and test every
performance objective and also retest any objective missed by
students.
The academy (NVCJA) also provides State-mandated minimum
inservice requirements (MIR) training. The inservice staff
coordinates with DCJS to ensure that every 2 years, all officers
receive at least 40 hours of State-mandated training, to include
instruction in the law. Taught almost exclusively by outside
instructors and coordinated by a professional staff, the academy
offers overs 100 inservice training classes. While inservice
training is not the focus of this article, information is
provided to give a more complete profile of the academy.
DEVELOPING THE ``STAR'' SYSTEM
Because the State requires that every student successfully
pass all of the performance objectives, several problems
immediately became evident when the academy staff first
approached the problem of more efficient curriculum management.
First, how could the academy successfully track each objective
through the training process to ensure accountability? Second,
what type of test construction would be needed to assure the
administration that mandated objectives would be adequately
tested and validated? Third, how could performance-based tests
be graded within a few hours, not a few days?
With these basic questions in mind, the recruit staff
concluded that a computer application might offer a workable
solution. After preliminary analysis and over 5 years of
refinement, the Student Testing and Records (STAR) System was
developed and is presently used at the academy. With this
program as the basic software package, the testing system
incorporates several components:
* An optical mark reader (SCANTRON), which automatically
scores each exam and feeds the raw data directly into a
computer
* An additional software program which provides both
database and spreadsheet capabilities
* An IBM compatible personal computer with 640K RAM memory
and a hard drive, and finally
* A laser printer for letter quality reports
This system costs less than $5,000. By using this
relatively simple but highly effective system, the curriculum
manager is now able to better manage the basic training
curriculum from tracking to testing to validation of each
State-mandated performance objective.
MANAGING THE PROCESS
At the core of the academy's curriculum and testing system
are the POs. Simply put, the tests must ensure that each student
masters each State-mandated PO. Thus, test construction and
administration are vital to the integrity of the academy's
curriculum management process. Performance-objective
accountability and the testing process are the primary
responsibilities of the academy's curriculum manager. From
lesson plan review to test construction and administration, the
curriculum manager is the academy's point man with regard to
accuracy and accountability.
Constructing Tests
All basic training examinations are constructed by the
curriculum manager. It is also his responsibility to analyze and
validate all test results for each recruit. The testing process
begins with the basic lesson plan, which is then reviewed and
approved by academy management. Written by staff instructors,
each lesson plan must be revised and updated at the end of each
training session. They must also contain those specific POs
mandated by the State and appropriate for that block of
instruction. Test questions flow from and can be directly
tracked to POs found in each lesson plan, thus assuring test
accountability. Staff instructors, accountable to both the
students and the curriculum manager, are responsible for ensuring
each PO is adequately taught. Student performance, at test
time, usually will reflect whether this situation has, in fact,
occurred.
At the end of each specified testing time period, the
curriculum manager begins to prepare a test that spans several
disciplines and many instructors. How the test construction
takes place mechanically is simple and is coordinated by the
curriculum manager. First, he speaks with all instructors to
verify that their test questions, which are based on the mandated
POs, have been taught and are part of a pre-existing database.
Second, the curriculum manager constructs a rough-draft test
based on pertinent subject area questions stored in the database.
The draft exam is then reviewed by all the respective instructors
for their final updates and edits. This phase of the process is
accomplished with a high degree of attention to exam security.
At this point, if an instructor did not teach a specific
objective, the instructor advises the curriculum manager who
deletes that PO from the current exam. It will, however, be
tested on a later exam, so as to comply with State mandates.
Third, the draft exam is then edited by the curriculum
manager based on specific verbal and written feedback from each
instructor. The final exam is then constructed, with the rough
draft copy kept on file for documentation and accountability.
Administering Tests
To ensure uniformity and test security, all exams are passed
out simultaneously to proctoring staff members who immediately
take them to the test sites. Proctors physically remain at each
test site for the exam's duration to ensure test integrity. Once
the tests are passed out, a staff member reads a test cover sheet
containing complete test instructions. Once the instructional
sheet has been read, the students begin their exams.
The tests are primarily multiple choice with very few
true-and- false questions. Students fill out their answers on an
answer sheet with a #2 pencil so that it can easily be read by
the optical mark reader.
When each recruit section is finished, all exams are
returned and accounted for by the curriculum manager. A single
missing exam is treated as a compromise to the test's integrity
and the results are then deemed invalid. This has yet to happen
at the academy while using this system.
Scoring Tests
To score each examination, the assistant director for basic
training and the curriculum manager work as a team to complete
the effort. First, the curriculum manager determines each answer
sheet is properly completed. If an answer sheet is incomplete,
the recruit officer is called in and asked to make the required
corrections. This pertains only to basic identification
information on the form and not to incomplete test answers.
Should a defective answer sheet get into the system, the computer
will automatically reject it when it is scanned. Multiple
answers, unclear erasures, or answer spaces left blank can cause
an answer sheet to be defective. In each case, the computer
indicates the nature of the problem, the location of the problem,
and will inquire what the user wishes it to do regarding the
defect.
To prepare the system for the grading mode, a master answer
sheet (previously prepared by the curriculum manager from the
master exam) is scanned. This sheet will provide the test basis
from which all student answer sheets will be graded. Each
student's answer sheet is then quickly fed into the scanner, with
the data automatically stored on the recruit section's
information disk. The scanning process takes approximately 3-5
minutes for a section of 25 to 30 recruits. After the scanning
step is completed, the computer produces a raw scores average
sheet which is a rank-order listing of each class member based on
the computer-generated averages of correct responses. This
immediately shows the curriculum manager what the statistical
range of the class is and if he has any individual failures to
review.
The next step in the grading process is item analysis and
test validation. To determine the relative fairness of each exam
question, the computer automatically produces a distractor
analysis document. The computer automatically views each
question, and where 50% or more of the class get a question
wrong, the question is reviewed and the instructor consulted. If
he or she feels the material was adequately covered, the question
will remain. If the question is tough, but fair, it stays in the
exam. However, where there exists reasonable doubt that the
students were genuinely confused by the question, it is
eliminated from the overall test score. The benefit of a doubt
is always given to the student. After all the eliminated
questions are determined, they are subtracted from the original
total to formulate a net basis for computing the final test
scores. Students must score 70% or better to pass.
Generating Reports
As an integral part of the process, the computer generates
several other reports. First, it produces a subject mastery
report (a report card) to each student which tells them how they
did in each subject area. Second, it produces the same report
but in a cumulative format, which is used by staff members for
counseling and remedial training. Third, a test answer sheet is
generated which tells the recruits not only the correct answer
but also what answer they put on their answer sheet. This report
also indicates that questions are State-mandated and require
retesting if missed. This capability provides a vehicle that
allows identification of missed POs and retest on a timely basis
by the curriculum manager, a procedure required by the State.
In short, using the software in the STAR program, the
computer can generate any aspects of the testing process into a
hard copy for the student staff member within an average of 2
hours--from start to finish.
Maintaining Security
The testing, grading, question database, lesson plans and
section data records are maintained on both floppy disk and hard
drive. As an added security feature, the curriculum manager's
office is locked during non-office hours and backup disks and
access codes are secured. Hard copies of exams, rough drafts,
and actual lesson plans are likewise kept secure.
CONCLUSION
A well-managed curriculum begins with a good job task
analysis and performance objectives that arise from such
analysis. In turn, lesson plans and student activities should be
based on those performance objectives and must be tested
accurately. Unfortunately, all too often, testing and tracking
of such objectives get so cumbersome that administrators of an
academy or educational institution do what they can, not what
they should. However, if applied meaningfully to the task, the
computer offers welcome relief to training administrators. The
NVCJA has, over the years, tried to develop and refine a process
that adequately manages a complex curriculum process without
hamstringing the staff--a compromise that is working very well.