Practical Assessment Exploration System (PAES)
PAES: Practical Assessment Exploration System
OUR MISSION: The goal of PAES is to determine what an individual can do on their own with as little help as possible.
“We never really know what a student can do until we give them a chance to try”
Educators of students with special needs are required to identify appropriate and measurable postsecondary goals based on age-appropriate transition assessments related to training, education, employment, and independent living.
Convert Your Classroom to a Workplace
How better to determine a student’s employment potential than to simulate jobs they might actually have in the future?
PAES encourages workplace independence and motivates students to achieve more. Suiting a wide range of ages and abilities, PAES is customizable to a student’s level of need.
The goal of PAES is to determine what an individual can do on their own with as little help as possible.
Performance Based Assessment
PAES provides three types of hands-on, performance-based assessments in one:
- Curriculum-Embedded Assessment
- Assessment and instructional tasks are indistinguishable: Reduces typical test-taking anxiety associated with paper pencil tests
- Formative Assessment
- Teachers interact with students: Identify immediate instructional needs, adjust instruction accordingly
- Authentic Assessment
- Mimics actual workplace settings; Assess based on real-world skills
PAES Suits a wide range of ages and abilities and is customizable to a student’s level of need
The PAES lab serves students who have learning disabilities, mild to moderate cognitive disabilities, hearing loss, physical disabilities, developmental and multiple disabilities.
Higher functioning students tend to move quickly through the PAES jobs to explore and identify their strengths and interests.
Students with more significant cognitive and physical challenges identify their strengths and needs by performing as many whole PAES jobs as possible followed by discovering which subtasks of other jobs can be performed.
PAES has 5 components:
Within each component, there are 8-10 job units. Each job unit has 6 levels of difficulty (from orange to brown).
- Consumer/Service
- Business/Marketing
- Processing/Production
- Constructional/Industrial
- Computer Technology
