State Standards, Assessments, and Time
Taking the time to insure quality teaching and learning
by Brad Best
October 03, 2006
The Nebraska State Board of Education has recommended specific learning standards in the area of math, science, reading, speaking, listening, and social studies. These standards are recommended to serve as the "backbone" of the school district's curriculum in each of these areas. Districts also have the option of adopting more rigorous standards if they wish to do so. The School District of Seward has adopted the state's learning standards and has been diligently working to align curriculum in grades K-12 in all of these academic areas.
Once the curriculums are aligned with the standards, districts must teach to all of the standards and develop assessments to measure the achievement of every student on a subset of these standards, known as the STAR standards. The assessments that are developed at the district level must meet a series of indicators approved by the Buros Center for Testing to ensure that they are of quality.
The assessments used in each Nebraska school district must:
l. Match and measure the standards. Districts must determine that the assessment measures the standards and that students have sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their ability to meet the standard.
2. Provide opportunity for students to have learned the content. Districts must have examined their own local curriculum to determine that the opportunity to meet the standards exists within the local district's curriculum and that instruction on the standards occurs at an appropriate time in relationship to assessment.
3. Be free of bias. Districts must examine the assessment to be sure that any of the items or tasks are free of bias and are not insensitive to any group or circumstance.
4. Be written at the appropriate level. Districts must examine the assessment items or tasks in order to determine that the expectations are appropriate for the assessed grade level.
5. Be reliable and consistently scored. Districts must document that they can have confidence in the results of the assessment, that assessment results have produced an appropriate level of reliability, .70 or higher.
6. Have appropriate mastery levels. Districts must describe the systematic way they have determined mastery levels for the assessment, including both professional judgment and actual student results.
Each question on every test used to measure proficiency for the state standards must travel through this series of evaluations. While some questions can easily be evaluated for bias, it may take hours to evaluate test questions to ensure that they are written at the appropriate mastery level. Once a test has been approved by external evaluators, if one question is changed, that question and the test as a whole must be re-evaluated to ensure quality.
This process must be completed in all subject areas of the state standards and the process must be meticulously documented. Beginning this school year, an external evaluation team will visit the school to assess the process to guarantee that the tests in reading, writing, speaking and listening meet all of these quality criteria.
Many schools across the state have chosen to utilize "general" tests, developed in a consortium fashion, thus reducing the amount of time needed to develop an end product. We don't feel that this serves our teachers or students in the highest manner. As a teacher, one uses specific language when teaching the concepts. A "canned test" may not use the same language or the same thinking process as what utilized in the classroom.
In using a generalized test, the teacher also needs to take time out of their normal instructional time to deliver the assessment specific to one standard in order to gather data. We feel that this, too, goes against what is considered to be best practices in the teaching and learning process. We don't teach a single standard in a lesson or unit; we teach many. In trying to relate numerous standards to one another in order to reach a higher level of understanding, several standards are taught in most of the daily lessons. We then need to use assessments that cover all of those standards while making sure that they meet the quality indicators mentioned earlier. The data from those assessments need to be reported by individual standard, however, so the results need to be disaggregated before the statistical analyses can be completed.
While this seems very technical in nature, this only scratches the surface of what needs to be accomplished throughout the school year in the area of standards and assessments. As we work to improve our assessments, we want to evaluate the data in order to make adjustments to the instruction to achieve better results. It is a VERY time consuming process and we don't want to do it just because we have to; we want to do it well.
In the next article, I will discuss some of the student achievement initiatives that we are currently researching for implementation across the district.
