The State of State Assessment
One conversation you are going to hear more and more about in the coming weeks and months will center on our current system of K-12 educational assessment in this state.
Let me go ahead and say it right now. Our current system of testing and assessment is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst…if continued without major alterations…is an increasing waste of time and effort for both teachers and students. We have got to continue to ask ourselves “Is this good enough? Can we do better?” Let me explain.
What we have in place now is an assessment of education. And that’s important. But what we really need is an assessment for education.
Our current “high stakes” test is a criterion referenced test. A summative assessment. It is designed to assess what children should know and be able to do, by grade level, based on standards that have been developed by the state. You might ask “Don’t we need to know that?’ And the answer is, absolutely. But it just isn’t enough.
Dr. Rick Dufour, the keynote speaker at this year’s Smart Conference in Little Rock… a conference designed to kick off the school year…, said it best when he stated that depending only on summative assessments is a failed policy. He went on to say that summative assessments can be most accurately compared to an autopsy. You can tell why the patient died, but that’s about it! It’s an assessment of education.
And in our case, when the “autopsy results” are received months after the assessment is given, it is of little, if any, value, other than an opportunity to say either “Gosh, we didn’t do so well”, or “Hey, that’s great, we did a little better”. In the state of Arkansas’ particular case, the results of the Benchmark Examinations that were given last March were not received until October…almost seven months after test administration… which means that all children who took the test had already moved to a higher grade before the results had even been received! It is almost useless as a tool to impact classroom practice.
Yes, we need summative assessments. We need them in a much more timely fashion, but we do need them. But we also need so much more. What we need, even more importantly than autopsies, are “examinations”.
We need an assessment for education. A comprehensive assessment that assesses and reports…not only in absolute terms (how students are performing compared to standards, which the CRT does), but also in value-added terms (how much more students know at the end of the school year as compared to the beginning) and comparative terms (a norm referenced assessment that shows performance in relation to district, state or national standards…or the relative performance compared to other students and schools).
And, as a result of Act 35, Arkansas law now requires these very things.
Some of you are probably sitting there right now and saying we are over-testing our children, as it is. You may be surprised to hear that I agree completely. I would contend that our children today are over-tested and under-assessed. So what we must do is address those concerns, while improving our assessment.
In early December, 2004, a group of superintendents who represented the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators and a group representing concerned business interests met in a series of meetings to discuss Education Reform Issues, implementation of the provisions of Act 35, and current issues that educators view as a hindrance to the new accountability legislation. One issue mentioned often by educators was the state’s current assessment system. Here are some problems they identified:
· The Benchmark Examination is administered too early and the results received are too late.
· The data provided by the Norm Referenced Test given last year is of incredibly limited usefulness because only 2 sub-tests, rather than a complete battery, were given. This has been almost testing for testing’s sake.
· The current combination of criterion referenced tests, norm referenced tests and end-of-course examinations make overall testing time required to administer the examinations much too long.
Because of these and other issues with the current state tests, over the past year, information has been made available regarding other states’ adoption of augmented tests, which are norm-referenced tests that have been customized, or “augmented” with the state’s criterion-referenced items, with attention to the test as a whole representing the state’s standards. Since many in the discussion were not familiar with augmented tests, a sub-committee of the superintendents group was assigned to determine assessment priorities and next steps to bring back to the group as a whole.
The sub-committee met in early January, 2005, and agreed on the following priorities for the Arkansas Assessment System:
· We need to give the test as late as possible (May) with the earliest turnaround of data available for staff development, school improvement planning, and re-rostering student groups into the most appropriate educational setting.
· The data should be rich and usable, as well as linked to national assessments such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
· The system has got to meet the mandates of Act 35, NCLB, and Omnibus (the U.S. Dept. of Education indicates that Arkansas’ system must be in place by September, 2006).
· The tests should be reportable with a proficiency standard, national percentile, and must have the capability of generating a value-added, longitudinal growth score… all from one single test!
The sub-committee determined that given these priorities, the current testing system did not meet these standards. Options included recommending the CRT and a Full Battery of a NRT, or an augmented test… one test that would positively address all the issues of concern. Since the state had no experience with all the pros and cons of an augmented test, a pilot augmented test was administered with 14 participating districts that included 5,000 4th grade students from across Arkansas, on May 16-20, 2005.
The feedback received from the participating districts was extremely encouraging. They felt
· Testing formats were appealing and appeared to be more user-friendly than the current tests.
· Turnaround of scoring and provision of student-level data was excellent. The test was administered the week of May 16 and results were received three weeks later.
· Student reports were appealing and provided rich information, including Proficiency Scores, National Percentile Rank, and Lexile Measures – all in the same report.
· Parents were especially pleased with the information provided for their students.
As a result, the group felt that, based on empirical evidence from the pilot test administration, an augmented assessment system can be more streamlined in regard to test administration, turnaround, and data than the current system, and a recommendation was made to the state to replace the current system with an augmented test which will benefit Arkansas’ schools and students.
It just makes so much sense! Subsequent to the pilot and recommendation, the state has now issued a Request For Proposal to consider an augmented assessment and a decision is to be made as to its merits on December 12th.
Bottom line: We need comprehensive assessments that are “examinations” to impact classroom practice now…not “autopsies” where results are received six or seven months after the assessment is given and children have moved on to the next grade.
Subsequent to this report, a Request For Proposal was developed, proposals were submitted to the Arkansas Department of Education and reviewed, and the Arkansas State Board of Education voted in March - 2005 to direct the Arkansas Department of Education to move the state to a comprehensive augmented assessment.
