Author: Grace Cajski
The Pacific East Comprehensive Center (CC) is working with education leaders and communities across Hawaiʻi, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands to address high-leverage problems. Defined as challenges that, when addressed, can catalyze broader movement across educational systems, for Pacific East CC co-director Dr. Kapono Ciotti, one question is critical for identifying these high-leverage problems: Is the issue we are trying to solve the most important or the most urgent?
Rather than responding only to challenges that demand immediate attention, Pacific East CC works with education leaders to identify which challenges’ solutions can create broader, long-term improvements. Ciotti sums up the process through analogy: “A high-leverage problem may be ‘the beginning of a domino chain,’ or ‘one big boulder that moves that allows access to something.’”
One example of this approach is the Pacific East CC’s current work with the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education (HIDOE) to rethink how the state’s education community understands and measures science learning. The project reflects Pacific East CC’s broader philosophy that lasting improvement begins by identifying the right problem to solve. “We come alongside the community,” Ciotti said. “The projects exist because they are important to the community.”
Ciotti and his team learned that science assessments in Hawaiʻi are administered once each in elementary school, middle school, and high school. Although these assessments provide useful information, a problem emerges: The assessments only measure isolated snapshots of student learning. This makes it difficult to determine whether changes in curricula, instructional strategies, or classroom resources are improving science learning over time, particularly at the level of individual students or classrooms.
To address this issue, Pacific East CC is working with education leaders to explore what Ciotti calls “metrics closer to students”—that is, metrics that better capture what students know and how they know it (e.g., via curricula, instructional strategies, or resources that help them engage in scientific thinking). “Metrics closer to students” could even capture evidence of learning that students are already creating by completing their assignments or discussing in class.
Ciotti also connects “metrics closer to students” to ʻāina, the Hawaiian term for “that which feeds.” ʻĀina learning goes beyond place-based education to ground all learning within relationships, environment, and experience. As such, students conduct science as an act of observing and investigating the world around them.
Waikalua Loko Iʻa—a 400-year-old Hawaiian fishpond in Kāneʻohe Bay, Oʻahu—serves as an example of ʻāina learning. The outdoor STEM learning laboratory allows students to discover hydrology by investigating the movement of water across a watershed. They begin by observing the uplands and the flow of streams toward the pond, the flow of tides into the pond, and the abundance of aquatic life in the estuary where salt and freshwater meet. From there, students are invited to investigate what kinds of agricultural systems would best make use of and support the flow of this water. This hands-on, applied investigation is much more relevant to students on an island than a graphical mock-up of a watershed projected on a classroom wall.
Moving forward, the Pacific East CC will work with the community to develop improved science assessments that are guided by input and knowledge from local residents, educators, and other stakeholders. Through connections to the community, the Pacific East project Strengthening Science Education to Advance Student Achievement can better situate Hawaiʻi’s science learners within the environments, relationships, and experiences that give learning meaning.
For HIDOE and Pacific East CC, one of the most important and most urgent “stones” facing Hawaiʻi schools are those that may be hindering alignment of assessment practices with Next Generation Science Standards. Finding ways to recognize and assess āina learning may help get at least one catalytic stone rolling, and it is that overall philosophy of determining which domino needs a push that is driving education improvement across the Pacific East region.
Suggested citation: Cajski, G. (2026, August 10). Helping Hawaiʻi rethink science learning beyond test scores. Pacific East Comprehensive Center DOI: Pending