These 4 assessment trends should remain top-of-mind

AUTHOR: Roger Riddell@EdDiveRoger

PUBLISHED : July 31, 2017

Alongside ESSA implementation, educators are still contending with opt-out movements, digital issues and a
need for better models

Few issues in K-12 education have been as contentious, particularly since the implementation of the
Bush-era No Child Left behind Act, as standardized testing.

Criticism over the years has focused largely on the impacts of attaching high -stakes to assessment results,
because of their connection to teacher and school evaluations. The fear is that this creates an environment that
“teaches to the test” at the expense of arguably every subject that isn’t math or reading. In return, that approach
risks stifling educators’ abilities to provide students a well-rounded education across all subject areas, as well as
their flexibility to innovate with different classroom approaches for fear that testing results not reflect
improvement.

To get you up to speed on the trends and issues impacting the current testing environment and help you
navigate this current dynamic, we’ve compiled this quick primer covering everything fr om parent-led opt-out
movements to the potential impact of the soon-to-be-implemented Every Student Succeeds Act.

1. Opt-out movements

Parent opposition to standardized testing bred significant opt-out movements in several states. Those movements
hit a peak in 2016, with particularly active movements in New York and Colorado risking federal sanctions for
those states if they didn’t meet a 95% testing threshold.

The movements themselves were found in a Columbia University Teachers College study to be comprised
predominantly of activists who were highly educated, wealthy, white, married and politically liberal. But the
movement also included homeschooling parents, childless adults in support of the cause, and parents who hadn’t
opted out their kids.

And they also expressed opposition to a variety of other educational issues across the political spectrum,
including test-based teacher evaluations, a narrowing of curriculum because of test prep, the corporatization and
privatization of education, and the Common Core State Standards.

Still, with standardized testing having risen to become the primary accountability tool for schools under the
previous No Child Left Behind law, critics argued that it ultimately forced schools and districts to pay attention
to groups of students who they had previously allowed to fall through the cracks.

2. Issues with digital

With the increasing presence of tech in classrooms, annual standardized exams have also gone digital. This has
led to notable issues in several states over the last few years, with glitches preventing students from effectively
completing exams on time.

In many cases, this has been chalked up to network infrastructure that couldn’t handle the demand of so many
students signing on for exams simultaneously. The FCC’s E-rate program can assist schools in upgrading their
networks to handle that load, but more planning before rolling out a new initiative is also important, as these
issues can be avoided ahead of time if mandates don’t force schools and districts to adopt new testing formats
before they’re prepared to do so successfully.

Beyond network issues, navigational limitations have also hindered student performance. A May study from the
American Association for the Advancement of Science showed lower scores on digital exams when elementary
and middle school students took digital exams that didn’t allow them to revisit previous questions. These design
issues are counterintuitive to effective testing strategies utilized on paper-and-pencil formats where students can
answer what they know first before revisiting items they were uncertain about.

Aside from requiring testing vendors to create more navigable digital exams, schools and districts may want to
have educators use tools like Google Forms to create practice tests that approximate those students will be
subjected to. Further design concerns have centered around ensuring accessibility for students with disabilities,
particularly the vision-impaired and color-blind, and the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

3. Efforts to find better, less rote ways of testing

Perhaps the greatest and longest-running concern with standardized testing — particularly when high stakes are
attached — is that it encourages educators to “teach to the test.” Curriculum in that case essentially becomes
focused overwhelmingly on the topics covered on a test, with learning focused on rote memorization over the
encouragement of critical thinking.

At its most basic level, it raises a question of whether such a system produces well-prepared and innovative
citizens or simply people who are good at taking tests and following orders.

In the No Child Left Behind Era, teaching to the test became problematic in that math and reading gained
precedent over other subjects since tests were focused on them. Among critiques are that this helped contribute
to current educational gaps in the broader sciences beyond math, as well as civics understanding and the creative
thinking that comes with the arts.

On the critical and creative thinking fronts, however, ed tech companies have been working in recent years to
rethink testing in a variety of ways. At its most outside-of-the-box, these efforts have included gamifying
assessments in a way that would require students to work through a simulation of a plausible real-world
experience, displaying subject matter competency rather than the ability to remember the correct answer. Despite
concerns that this approach might lead students to take tests less seriously, efforts to produce a working model
are ongoing in education as well as the workforce.

4. Impact of ESSA

Of course, the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act — currently underway — is the elephant in the
room when it comes to all of the above topics. Under the law as it was written, states are expected to get some
leeway on testing and accountability. This is meant to encourage more classroom innovation without the specter
of consequences looming over educators should an experiment not fully pan out, in addition to encouraging
curricula that provide students a well-rounded education as opposed to one based primarily on what’s tested.

Critics, however, had expressed concern that new approaches under the law that would utilize, for example,
interim assessments might not produce the same actionable results that previous summative assessment
approaches did. Naturally, both approaches have their pros and cons.

It also remains to be seen how regulations implemented under the Betsy DeVos -led U.S. Department of
Education will impact expectations for states under the new law. Republicans have notably expressed
frustration with some of the department’s approach to oversight on state plans thus far, but how hard they might
ultimately push back is another question entirely.

Classroom Assessments for a New Century

One teacher's quest to move beyond the bubble test.
By Heather Wolpert-Gawron

Coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, I thought of school as a parallel universe. There was school life,
which happened between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and there was real life, which was everything that
happened outside of those hours. These two separate worlds did not relate to one another. I couldn’t see how
the skills I was learning in the classroom aligned with those I thought were necessary to live beyond the
school walls.
In the 21st century, we can no longer afford this disconnect. To help students become college- and career-
ready, we need to teach them how to apply what they are learning in school to the practical and intellectual
tasks in their everyday lives. We need to teach them new skills that will help them thrive in an increasingly
interconnected and fast-changing world. School, in other words, can no longer just be “academic.”

In the 21st century, we are facing a global economy where information travels at the speed of light and
knowledge of how to harness and sift through that information has become vital to our personal and national
well-being. As an educator, I know my students must graduate from our halls ready to function in this
expanded world.
However, in education, as we know, the tail that wags the dog is the standardized test. Standardized tests
dictate our curriculum. And unfortunately, these assessments remain submerged in the bubble test format
made popular in the mid-1930s when, according to Time magazine, the automated test scanner first appeared.
In truth, this method of testing may assess content knowledge, but not what will soon be more important: the
ability to communicate that content and problem-solve.
The question is: Until those tests go away or are transformed, can we, the classroom teachers, cater to two
masters—the predictable testing format and the skills we know ethically we must teach our students to
prepare them for their futures? I believe we can.

Behind Classroom Doors

The key here is in what we do behind our own classroom doors. We may have to live with these bubble tests,
but we need to make sure that our own classroom assessments are aligned with the skills our students will
need in the future. We can go ahead and continue to teach content knowledge to prepare our students for their
bubble tests, but we should develop assessments that challenge their ability to apply that content. Instead of a
multiple-choice question that asks what the theme of a story is, for example, we might have students describe
how that theme applies to real life. Instead of a multiple-choice question about a particular date in history, we
might have our students find a similar current event and relate it to past events. Instead of a multiple-choice
question to answer an equation about the area of a figure, we might have students apply that equation to a
local architectural structure and describe why knowing its dimensions is important.
Learning today isn’t just about subject knowledge. It’s more about methodology and how to apply that
knowledge. When I plan my lessons, I begin with the list of new skills I want to teach and design assessments
to match those skills. I then backward-plan the lessons to align them with the assessments.

Here are some other ideas to jump-start your use of 21st-century assessments:
Collaborate: Have students create a wiki to promote a book that your class is reading. Or use
videoconferencing tools to help them conduct small-group work with students outside your own classroom.
Use rubrics to assess students’ collaborative abilities. Have students assess themselves and each other’s
contributions to determine an individual and a group grade.
Connect through writing: Have your students write and moderate a discussion-thread online using a secure
blogging program like kidblog.org. Pick a topic for your classroom that can be sustained so that the
conversation goes on long after the school bell rings. Have students provide links in their text so they can
share further research on the topic. Their blog can be assessed as a writing piece, but their ability to comment
and give advice should count equally.
Persuade: Have students research a local social cause, create a Facebook fan page to promote its importance,
and do an oral presentation for the school board or local community members. Advocacy of any kind is a
skill that students can put to future use. You should assess them each step of the way—in their written pitches
to you, in their visual or online ads for their peers, and in their oral presentations. You could even have the
students design the rubrics themselves ahead of time and come to a consensus about what exceeds and what
doesn’t satisfy expectations.
Summarize and synthesize: Have students create an executive summary about a local cause that could be e-
mailed to policymakers and community leaders. Have them insert pictures and links to resources and to video
footage in their packet to provide further information about their cause. Their PR package then becomes its
own assessment: a multi-genre piece of written fact, anecdote, visual guides, and links.
Use critical thinking: Keep assignments open-ended so that students are allowed choice of presentation and
format. Let them decide what strategies best define the project. Student choice is the best differentiation
available, and it also reflects a more authentic real-life experience. After all, there is choice outside of school,
and we should mirror those opportunities inside school. Also, teach students how to ask deeper questions as a
means to assess strong comprehension. (For more information, research Costa’s Levels of Questioning,
which describe three levels of questioning for inquiry-based learning.) Another possibility: Have students
create a survey using a service like surveymonkey.com. Have them pose a series of questions for peers to
answer oriented around the content they’re studying. Assess the survey based on the quality of questions
asked and the variety of formats—true or false, open-ended, multiple-choice, or short answer—they used.
Problem-solve: Allow students to use their classroom tests formatively. Have them reflect on answers they
missed by creating working portfolios. Have them record their reflections on why they answered how they
did and why the correct answer is right. Have them describe their realizations in writing. Have them graph
their overall improvement from quarter to quarter. Give them the opportunity to improve their initial scores
by turning in their reflections for credit.
I challenge you to make these 21st-century skills and assessments a focus in your classroom. Roll up your
sleeves and arm yourself with the knowledge of what’s to come so that our students will have the skills to
thrive once they leave us. You have chosen to work in a profession that is meant to prepare children for their
future. Despite what our current standardized tests look like, keep your students’ future in mind: Close your
door, dig in, and prepare them.