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I think it's important to see examples of how public schools are addressing high stakes accountability driven evaluation systems. It's possible to talk to learners about competency and mastery of knowledge and skills and let people define what that makes look like in projects that motivate them. How can we reintroduce passion and interest back into the ways we think about assessment?

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Competency-based education personalizes how students show mastery by giving them choice in how they're assessed.

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What to do in the face of overtesting? Ravitch says opt out.

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What to do in the face of overtesting? Ravitch says opt out.

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Diane Ravitch, once the biggest proponent of national standards and testing, has famously walked back from that position. She now leads the National Opt Out Movement to encourage students, parents, and teachers to resist high stakes standardized tests that have had a detrimental effect on curriculum and teaching in public schools.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/04/03/diane-ravitch-why-all-parents-should-opt-their-kids-out-of-high-stakes-standardized-tests/?utm_term=.d7b9463fcb2d

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Message from Diane Ravitch about Opt Out

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The Network for Public Education is calling for a national Opt Out of high stakes standardized testing, supporting the tens of thousands of parents and children nation wide, who will be refusing to participate the annual tests. 
www.networkforpubliceducation.org

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Once again standardized testing time has creeped up upon us! And with finals right around the corner too, I thought it would be a good time to repost a comic that outlines the phases of test taking. Enjoy, and don't forget to check out the campaign for the 180Dayz 2017 School Year Calendar. Here is the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37496334/180dayz-teacher-comics-wall-calendar?ref=discovery

Thanks!

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Once again standardized testing time has creeped up upon us! And with finals right around the corner too, I thought it would be a good time to repost a comic that outlines the phases of test taking. Enjoy, and don't forget to check out the campaign for the 180Dayz 2017 School Year Calendar.

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What does a test test? Washback of standardized testing

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What does a test test? Washback of standardized testing

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As several classmates have pointed out, assessment often misses the mark in terms of measuring real world skills.
In middle school and high school, I studied Spanish. For 6 years,  I was taught Spanish, but we never used it in class. In the end, I took a  New York State Spanish proficiency test and I got 98% on the test, even though I can't speak or understand Spanish. My friend, who is Colombian, speaks and understands Spanish fluently. He took the same test, and he got an 84%. The moral of the story: Standardized tests are made for good test takers, but don't necessarily translate to real-world application.
The washback, or real-world impact on teaching and learning,  of this test , and many other high stake standardized tests, is that many classes teach towards a test, even at the expense of the real skills that the test is meant to measure. People with real-world skills may be denied the opportunity in education or the professional world because of low test scores.
Here at Teachers College, I took a class with Dr. Jim Purpura, one of the current leading minds in assessment in ESL. He is working with others to make standardized assessment a better measure of real-world skills, but for now, the current practice is still a long way off.

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Two new studies lay bare how the assessment and accountability systems in use throughout the United States shortchange teachers and schools by not presenting accurately what their students know, can do and have learned in the last year.

The recently released studies concern the efficacy of Teach to One: Math, an innovative blended-learning model that Heather Staker and I discussed in our book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. The studies highlight not only the profound impact blended-learning models can have on student outcomes, but also raise deeper questions about whether our country's current assessment and accountability system may be undermining the ability for schools to deliver on those outcomes.

As background, Teach to One: Math is a model that personalizes learning. Developed by the non-profit New Classrooms Innovation Partners, it emerged from an initiative within the New York City Department of Education called School of One, which Time named as one the year's Best Inventions in 2009. Thirty-nine schools across 11 states now use Teach to One: Math.

Partner schools that adopt Teach to One: Math typically replace their traditional textbook-based math program with this new approach. Students learn through a variety of modalities - from teachers, in collaboration with peers, and independently. Each day students take an online assessment that helps determine what they will learn the next day. Teach to One generates about 10,000 unique daily student schedules that include what skill a student will work on, the material through they will learn it, where in the room the learning takes place, and which teachers are assigned to which groups. The approach is designed to enable personalization for students while fostering a more collaborative and sustainable role for teachers.

The first study was a rigorous, federally-funded evaluation by Doug Ready at Teachers College and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) that focused on the implementation of Teach to One: Math at five schools in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The study focused on comparing student performance on state tests each year of the program. Although it could not discern impact in the five schools that implemented the program, the study could not form any generalizable conclusions either.

The education trade reports and headline writers raced predictably to offer banners of failure while ignoring the most useful part of the evaluation itself-what actually happened in the schools themselves and what it teaches us about the impact of well-intentioned education policies that assume that annual grade-level instruction for all students is the most efficient path to college and career readiness.

Teach to One is designed to meet students where they are and enable them to accelerate toward college and career readiness as efficiently as possible. For many students, that may mean having to go back and address unfinished learning from prior years in service of getting students back to grade level. This is especially critical in math, where skills build upon one another each year.

As sensible as that approach might seem, the problem is that every day a student spends working below their grade level by age is one less day they have to cover grade-level material. And the test that matters (both for state accountability purposes and for the federal evaluation) is one that's focused only on grade-level content.

Even though it might make pedagogical sense to go back and fill gaps, that's not what today's policies and tests signal teachers should do.

This challenge is by no means unique to Teach to One. Speak with most middle grade math teachers and you would hear a similar predicament. What's different with Teach to One is that schools must grapple explicitly with this tension in how they configure the program itself so that those choices can be embedded into student learning progressions. In schools that don't use models like Teach to One, teachers are expected to somehow figure it all out on their own.

The federal study describes in great detail what happened in Elizabeth when schools confronted this hard choice. According to the study, schools acted in vastly different ways. Some required that Teach to One include academic "floors" and "ceilings" in order to prioritize exposing students to grade-level content and required all eighth graders to learn Algebra regardless of their academic readiness. The strategies varied by school and also changed continually throughout the implementation.

These shifts were far more profound than the typical implementation ebbs and flows that most studies include. It fundamentally caused the program students experienced to fall out of alignment with what was being assessed. As a result, the study made clear that the results shouldn't be used to draw any generalized conclusions about the program itself-a key point sadly omitted from most of the press coverage.

The second study, which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded and MarGrady Research conducted, focused on the entire set of schools implementing Teach to One over three years (not just those in Elizabeth) and on results from NWEA's MAP assessment, a widely-used adaptive test that is more effective at measuring student learning growth than state tests because it includes items from across multiple grade levels. For example, when a seventh-grade student who arrives to school at a fourth-grade level grows to a sixth-grade level in the course of one year, those gains would more likely get picked up by the MAP than by the state test. Which, when you think about it, is absurd that schools and teachers wouldn't be rewarded for helping a student make two full years of academic gains in just one year.

MarGrady found that students enrolled continuously in Teach to One saw 23% greater gains than students nationally, and, more salient to prove that the nation's assessment systems shortchange individual students' growth, that students in schools with accountability systems aligned fully to the program's intent-meaning no floors or ceilings-saw gains that were 53% above the national average. Students in the latter group grew an impressive 38 percentile points from the time they came into 6th grade to the time they left eighth grade.

New Classrooms should probably have thought twice before signing up for a federal evaluation oriented around proficiency gains on annual standardized assessments given that the program is oriented around individualized learning pathways in service of high school readiness.

But those who take the time to read the federal study, not just the press coverage, will come to understand the key lesson: Be sure to align the instructional approach with the measure of success from day one. Otherwise, there isn't much to be learned.

And those who read the the MarGrady study will see that Teach to One seems to be having its strongest impact in schools that allow for meeting each student's needs regardless of her assigned grade level.

We need more research to deepen our understanding of both Teach to One and personalizing learning more broadly. But in the interim, the more meaningful contribution of these two studies may actually be in the additional question they inherently raise: Is an assessment and accountability system that signals an exclusive instructional focus on grade-level material in the best interest of all students?

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Why The Nation's K-12 Accountability And Assessment System Doesn't Make The Grade

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Two new studies involving Teach to One: Math lay bare how the assessment and accountability systems in use throughout the United States shortchange teachers and schools by not presenting accurately what their students know, can do, and have learned in the last year.

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Wan Sze:
As a student, assessment were equated to tests and exams for me. As a teacher, I realised that for many of my students, beyond knowing academic content, many did not have test taking literacies such as how to use limited time strategically, planning and reading and interpretation of questions. Not mastering these skills can impact their eventual grades even if they have studied.
Another issue I grappled with as an educator was when alternative assessments was heavily touted as the way to go, to move away from traditional pen and paper tests. It was baffling because our national assessments were not changing any time soon. It was at a talk by Prof. Dylan William that he demystified assessment and I came away assured that it is not the assessment that makes the difference, it is how we use the assessment as educators and as schools. Formative assessment is how we gather information regularly when I teach and the use we make of the information we gather. Having the most interesting tasks and rubrics make no difference if we are just giving a final grade at the end of the year, semester or unit.

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I began my teaching career in the fall of 2001, just before No Child Left Behind was passed. The influence of this, and the use of standardized tests in general, makes me feel like education was very different for me as a student than it was for me as a teacher.

I remember sitting in a district wide meeting early in my career and listening to the superintendent tell us that we would be focusing our efforts on getting students to pass tests and that science and social studies teachers should spend as much class time as we could reinforcing reading, writing, and math skills because those were tested subjects and therefore more important than our content based disciplines.

In the early days of AYP, when we were all coming to grips with the idea that funding could be based on student test scores, I remember watching one of my students come into school late one afternoon, having just had a physical fight with his father, and knowing that he would show up to school the next day and take a standardized test. His mental condition didn't matter to the state. His physical condition didn't matter to the state. All that mattered was his test score. I was young and naive and completely shaken by the injustice and inequity of the system.

I remember teaching in a public district that had 5 high schools, each with several thousand students, and being told that district policy would be that every single chemistry student in the entire district would take the exact same first and second semester final exams. How could that possibly allow teachers to be their best selves in the classroom, or allow students the opportunity to actually learn the material? How would it allow for anything other than teachers sticking to a strict schedule to make sure they "covered" everything before the tests, regardless of where the students were?

Now, working in an independent school, I have quite a bit of autonomy with my assessments, so I can ensure they happen when students are ready, and I can use a variety of methods. However, the specter of assessments is still strong as students spend an enormous amount of time, money, and emotional energy on the SAT, ACT, and SAT subject tests.

In my 18 years of teaching, I've come to have a better understanding of a lot of things, such as pedagogy, relationship building, and curricular choices. But I admit that assessment still stumps me, and is the root of many of my frustrations with the education system.

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As an educator, I am always very interested in assessment because it measures learning outcomes and determines students' career pathways and/or academic capabilities at different points in time. The issue of standardized tests, especially, has troubled my mind for a long time and I am yet to get over it.

Students are really good at taking tests (basically regurgitating information) but there is usually no rigor (transfer of knowledge to real-world issues as we discussed in class). Is the purpose of learning not forfeited in the name of assessment?

I struggle to understand the fairness in standardized tests since we all know that learners learn at different levels. How can one test be adequately used to measure the learning outcomes of different learners?

I don't even want to dive into the effect of these assessments on teachers or even parents. If we were to honestly thoroughly analyze standardized tests, the cons far outweigh the pros. That's my take.

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Whenever I think about assessment, I immediately think of this distinct memory from elementary school when we were tested on our multiplication. For 12 weeks, we studied the times tables from 1 to 12 (Week 1: 1x Week 2: 2x etc.). Every Friday we were given a timed test, and we were instructed to complete as many answers within the time limit. It would look something like this:
3 x 1
3 x 3
3 x 6
3 x 8
3 x 4
3 x 10
3 x 2
3 x 7
3 x 12
3 x 5
It stands out to me for multiple reasons. One, I was always anxious leading up to the test, and I recall wanting to do well or complete the most correct answers. Two, it worked. In other words, I feel like I know my multiplication exceedingly well in comparison to any other math function. However I only know that it worked for me. Why did this resonate with me as a learner? How did others in my class feel about this way of assessment?

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As an educator, when I think of assessment I immediately think of the data and number crunching that came with each assessment cycle at my school. I had an involved spreadsheet (see image) where I tracked student progress throughout the year, compared their current achievement to last year's achievement, and tried to make predictions about what they would score on their End of Grade (EOG) tests. Data is a prevalent part of many schools' cultures today and while I think there are certainly benefits to responding to student performance and adjusting instruction to better meet the needs of students, I feel as though educators often have to be (because of their own and their school's evaluations) so focused on assessments, that it is easy to miss what students really need on a given day or slow down instruction to build a deeper understanding of content. Data never tells the whole picture, so I wonder how we can change assessment to show more of who a teacher, a student, and a school truly are?