Flickr: Renata Ganoza

After more than ten years of national education policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the words accountability and assessment have become synonymous at many public schools with high-stakes testing. The two government programs have attached consequences and rewards to standardized test scores, leading many educators to believe they have to teach to the test. But, as the well-known argument goes, teaching prescribed math and reading content doesn’t help students build the skills like creativity, problem-solving and adaptability they need to adapt in the world outside of school.

Many educators are hoping that as Common Core State Standards roll out across the country, teaching and assessment can focus more on problem-solving and the process of getting to an answer, rather than a focus on the answer itself. But, even those process-oriented skills will be assessed with a standardized test – either the Smarter Balanced Assessment or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

The Smarter Balanced Consortium conducted a pilot of their test earlier this year to help participating schools get a sense of what the tests would be like, as well as to evaluate logistical challenges in administering the computer-based test. An Education Week article explains:

The biggest idea that the pilots underscored for many educators was that the key for getting ready for the tests is not just getting the technology ready, but also having students and teachers know the standards.

“I think we have to make sure we are teaching and assessing with intent on the common core,” Henson [a Michigan superintendent of instruction] says. “It is really skills-based. Reading, writing, and listening skills are a huge part of being able to take that test.”

The article indicates that teachers will still be teaching to the test — they’re just hoping the test will measure how a learner thinks, not just what they’ve memorized. That’s the big question, and early studies suggest they will.

One report [PDF] conducted by The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards & Student Testing, or CRESST, at the University of California, Los Angeles indicates that the new tests “are likely to represent important goals for deeper learning, particularly those related to mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.”

[RELATED READING: Will the New Online Standardized Tests Be Different?]

But other education researchers wonder if high-stakes testing in any form can truly measure the skills that not only deepen learning, but turn a student into a life-long learner.

“People often try to figure out what makes a difference in education and they try to find different variables that might explain that difference,” said Brent Duckor, a professor at San Jose State University focusing on assessment. “It’s been harder for people to measure, and put the resources around measuring, the so-called soft skills — let’s call them resiliency, persistence, a sense of caring and engagement with school — and to use those in conjunction with the more typical academic achievement measures.” The benefits of the harder-to-quantify skills aren’t easily disentangled from academic achievement scores, making it hard to prove through tests that alternative teaching and learning styles can achieve measurable outcomes.

This tension arises clearly with one of the hottest topics in education right now – project-based learning. Many educators hope this method of teaching content through inquiry and exploration will implicitly deepen learning and shift it towards the goals outlined in Common Core.

“If we are going to measure something, it’s going to take time and it’s going to take resources and effort,” said Duckor. “And what we’ve seen is a lot less attention on measuring those skills in any rigorous or reliable way.” It would take much more time and money to really develop assessments that measure creativity or resilience, but states have neither the time, money nor political will to do so, Duckor said.

“To the extent that policymakers can go back to the drawing board and say, ‘How could Smarter Balanced find ways to investigate the validity and the reliability of teacher claims,’ we could say there would be an advance,” Duckor said. He’d like to see more alternative methods of assessment used.

School-based accountability, where student achievement and progression is determined by teachers, not a state test, is one such method that’s already been studied by researchers. New York City’s Central Park East Secondary School, a progressive poster child in the 1990s, provides an example of how school-based accountability works.

[RELATED READING: How Do You Measure Learning?]

Central Park East developed systems to assess student work that meet the criteria for authentic assessment that well-known researchers like Stanford’s Linda Darling Hammond have determined to be successful. In a soon-to-be-published article, Duckor and co-author Daniel Perlstein argue that the school evaluated projects by asking students to demonstrate knowledge, understand various perspectives on it, connect it to other learning, make conclusions based on varying sets of conditions and be able to discuss its relevance. Most of these elements were included in subject-based portfolios that students created and had to defend in front of a committee that included teachers, students and outside adults.

But Central Park East’s model couldn’t hold up to the strong pressures for standardized testing. “The pressures to develop easily measured and easily routinized forms of assessment, and easily measured and easily routinized forms of teaching and learning, in turn, made the school increasingly less successful and less central to reform,” said Daniel Perlstein, professor of education history at the University of California, Berkeley. There has always been a reform movement pushing for more democratic and socially oriented education in the U.S., but historically those efforts haven’t faired well on tests.

“The American educational system was as successful in the absence of high-stakes standardized, centralized forms of assessments, as it is now, perhaps more successful,” said Perlstein. “There are various forms of accountability and the notion that we have to make accountability an easily measurable test item is one notion of accountability, but by no means the most useful for kids, for teachers or for the society as a whole.”

Perlstein points to other measures of a school’s success. Are parents satisfied with the education their children are receiving? Are students engaged and excited to come to school? Those are measures of accountability that don’t carry much weight when it comes to funding, teachers salaries or national rankings, but might be the most important for encouraging life-long learners.

Moving away from tests as the only means to measure knowledge, both at the school level and on state tests, frees teachers up to teach in more dynamic ways. “It’s a question of whose accountability and for whose good,” said Duckor. “And what infrastructure do we have to support communities that would like to have school-based accountability, but at this point are being measured by somebody else’s yardstick?”

For Perlstein, it comes down to the basic fact that teachers, students and schools have a deep capacity for engaging, thoughtful work, but aren’t often given the credit for their efforts. “In schools across the country teachers are trying to figure out how to do their job better,” said Perlstein. “The systems of accountability we have, rather than helping them do that, typically get in the way of that.”

Getty Images

Competency-based learning, which allows students to progress at their own pace after they’ve shown mastery of a subject, rather than by their age, is quickly gaining momentum. Already, a few states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon are moving towards implementing competency-based learning models throughout the entire state. What’s more, 40 states have at least district experimenting with the model. But despite this growth, its proponents say federal policies for accountability and assessment are holding the movement back.

KnowledgeWorks, an organization that supports three education-focused initiatives — New Tech Network, EDWorks and Strive — recently released a report highlighting the pain points between federal policy and a competency-based system. The report, Competency Education Series: Policy Brief One [PDF], points out that, although the federal government has supported some aspects of competency-based learning, implementing the new model can be difficult because of federal restrictions.

“The greatest conflict stems from disconnect with the work on the ground and federal accountability and assessment systems,” the report states. “Implementers faced with this disconnect have no choice but to juggle two systems: one required by federal law and one developed by the educators, students, parents, and community leaders committed to successful implementation of competency education.”

CLASHES OVER TIME

Time is the biggest point of contention between the two systems. The federal government measures school accountability as well as student achievement through time-based modules. Seat time and annual test results are the primary ways that the government keeps schools accountable, categorizes them, and targets them for intervention. And required end-of-year tests focus school instruction timelines in specific ways that do not allow students to move at their own pace, a key element of a competency-based system.

With the competency models, students take summative assessments at various times throughout the year. They demonstrate what they’ve learned as they’re learning — not just during one or two big testing seasons, as most schools do.

WHAT’S WORTH TESTING?

Another big difference between the two systems is what gets tested. Competency-based learning focuses not just on content, but also on “soft skills” like communication, collaboration, and other higher-order thinking skills. In contrast, the federal assessments focus on the subjects of math and English Language Arts aligned with academic achievement standards, but not necessarily with core competencies. In other words, everything is based on a number score, not on whether the student can demonstrate that he can do each individual task determined to be a core competency.

Federal accountability standards track student achievement, not growth. Many competency-based models are tracking progression in career and college readiness as well as core competencies, and those can’t be reported to the federal government under the current rubrics.

COST

The report also identifies limited resources as a roadblock to improve assessments, which they agree are essential, in order to complement the competency-based system. States already spend a significant amount of money on required federal assessments, so there’s no additional money to invest in assessments that would allow for demonstration of mastery or to evaluate throughout a year and not just at the end.

NEXT STEPS

The KnowledgeWorks report doesn’t give a smoking-gun solution for the various problems it raises. Instead, the group intends to continue investigating how federal policies could encourage competency-based learning by studying the effects of the few programs the government has decided to fund in this area. The organization also plans to pull together best practices from states moving ahead despite the challenges and to figure out how competency-based education could be assessed in a more comparative way.

Sarah Garland

Fifth graders at Townsend Elementary in the Appoquinimink district waiting to begin the state standardized reading test.

By Sarah Garland

New high-tech standardized tests are coming soon to schools across the country, but will these new tests really revolutionize how we measure whether children are learning? The designers of the new tests, which a majority of states plan to adopt in two years, are allowing a sneak peek at sample questions.

Two competing state coalitions have taken on the job of designing the new tests, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and both have posted examples of what’s coming on their websites.

• Sample English/Language Arts question from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
• Sample Math question from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
• Sample question from third grade assessment from PARCC
• Sample math question from high school assessment from PARCC

In some questions, which the test designers have called “computer enhanced,” students will be asked to drag words or numbers across the screen, or to highlight phrases or sentences in a reading passage. In one example provided by Smarter Balanced to reporters during a conference call Monday, high school students can click on the screen to transfer water from a cube to a cylinder, which helps them solve a math problem about radius.

There will also be problems that require research and writing. Smarter Balanced officials gave an example of a multi-part question in which high school students are asked to imagine they are the chief of staff for a congresswoman. Before they start working on the test, their teacher is supposed to lead a classroom activity about nuclear power. The students are then asked to come up with a list of pros and cons about nuclear power. Finally, they must write up a presentation for the congresswoman to give at a press conference later that day.

“I can tell you, that’s real world,” said Barbara Kapinus, the director of English language arts and literacy for Smarter Balanced. “I’ve been in that situation.”

Many questions will continue to be multiple-choice, however. States have favored multiple-choice tests because they are cheaper to design and score, and since answer sheets can be run through a computer. Questions like the one about nuclear power are more expensive, because they will likely require a trained evaluator to score them.

One of the biggest concerns about the new tests has been how to finance them. The two coalitions designing the tests won grants from the federal government to pay for the beginning of the process, but this funding won’t cover ongoing expenses related to the tests, like paying people to score answer sheets and the cost of new computers and expanded bandwidth.

In the conference call with reporters, the director of Smarter Balanced, Joe Willhoft, said states that have signed on for the tests have agreed to pay annual administrative fees associated with the tests. “The lion’s share of those costs is bundled up in the human scoring,” he said.

This post originally appeared on The Hechinger Report.

Flickr: Albertogp123

New technology-based assessments will replace standardized bubble tests.

Last September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced: “Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time–and so have America’s teachers, parents, students, and school leaders.”

Duncan was excited about a new way of testing students, one that goes “beyond the bubble test,” the standardized assessments students take every year that have long been criticized as not only useless in measuring any kind of real learning, but actually detrimental to the entire education system.

Ask most teachers, and you’ll hear a litany of reasons why they detest these assessments. They contend the current tests have no bearing on student learning. They waste time that could be better spent in class (the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles, “dismisses the weeks before spring testing as ‘Bubbling-In 101,’” according to a Los Angeles Times article.) They complain about having to teach to the tests, leaving them little time to try new ways of engaging students. And in some states, teachers are evaluated based on those very scores.

With stakes so high, teachers, parents, and school administrators are watching the developments of the new tests closely. The actual details of what these new assessments will look like is being revealed along the way– and it’s extremely complicated. In brief, two separate groups — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium — are using the federal government’s Race to the Top Funds to come up with the new testing systems, which will be used by different states. (You can read much more about the details in this recent story in Education Week.)

Both groups will create tests using technology in both administering and scoring and will measure “performance-based tasks, designed to designed to mirror complex, real-world situations,” according to the New York Times.

“In performance-based tasks, which are increasingly common in tests administered by the military and in other fields, students are given a problem — they could be told, for example, to pretend they are a mayor who needs to reduce a city’s pollution — and must sift through a portfolio of tools and write analytically about how they would use them to solve the problem,” the article explains.

There are high expectations for the new tests. Last month, a who’s-who of educators and education experts published an open letter outlining what’s at stake:

If done correctly, the shift from pencil-and-paper to online assessments will build upon this opportunity to transform the nation’s education system and provide a platform for new approaches to learning and schooling, not just to testing. If done incorrectly, however, the adoption of these assessments also has the potential to lock our education system—for another decade or more—into its current factory-era model that has proved so inadequate to the task of meeting our nation’s education goals in the 21^st century.

Some schools across the country are already moving in this innovative direction, as they shift from focusing on obsolete inputs of the past like seat time to creating new, blended schooling models that combine the best of face-to-face and online learning. An assessment framework stuck in the factory-era relic of its predecessors would not only be orthogonal to innovative efforts like these, but could also serve to stifle further innovation—literally cutting it off at the knees.

The writers make three recommendations: to create a “dynamic testing ecosystem” that includes a variety of platforms rather than just one test; to integrate innovation like instant feedback and real-time, adaptive assessments; and one that supports “competency-based learning,” not based on the school calendar, but when the student learns the subject.

The letter has made the rounds in education circles and has been signed by hundreds so far.

BEYOND TESTING

Apart from those lobbying for reform in testing, there’s another movement afoot advocating that teachers, parents and students opt out of testing altogether. New York City educator Lisa Nielsen proposes that teachers boycott standardized tests for all the reasons outlined above, and then some. “Outdated assessments are driving outdated instruction,” she writes.

People have created Facebook groups for opting out, including one called Parents and Kids Against Standardized Testing, which has more than 1,000 fans. A recent CNN story describes a mother who refused to have her two kids take standardized tests, while another decided to have her kids take it “because she’s afraid that holding her daughter out could harm the school’s test results.”

Will these new high-tech assessments fulfill everyone’s high expectations? With so many ancillary issues tangled with it, as well as states’ different priorities and standards, that’s far from being determined.