As the state prepares to conduct a final trial of the new Smarter Balanced student assessment, the Department of Education continues to answer questions about the nuts and bolts of the new test.
The goal of the Smarter Balanced test is to assess how well First State students are faring based on the Common Core State Standards, which were created in an effort to establish consistent educational standards across the country and ensure that students graduating from high school are career or college ready.
[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/TheGreen_02282014_3SmarterBalanced.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media News Director Tom Byrne and contributor April Hall discuss the state's roll-out of Smarter Balanced.]
During a workshop with school board members from around Delaware earlier this month, an informal poll found that the majority of responders had heard zero to two presentations on the details of Common Core Standards implementation in the state. Most responders also characterized their knowledge of the Smarter Balanced assessment as “low” or “very low.” During the February 6th workshop, state officials went into details about how and why initiatives like Common Core State Standards and the Smarter Balanced student assessment are being rolled out.
The meeting was, in part, a preparation for the final field test of Smarter Balanced which is slated to begin March 18 in Delaware. Across the state, no grade level will run more than one subject’s exam this spring so as not to interfere with the Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System (DCAS), the current state student assessment, or overload students with excessive test-taking. Smarter Balanced will replace DCAS in the next academic year.
“At the simplest level the DCAS was built to assess students on the Delaware standards and that was done a number of years ago,” said Mark Murphy, Delaware secretary of education. “Now that we have adopted Common Core Standards, it is important that we have an assessment that matches that.”
Twenty-two states across the country are in the consortium adopting the Smarter Balanced test and a four-year federal grant worth $175 million made the development of the test free for participating states. Officials say the expense of implementation and scoring of the test should be the same or less than DCAS.
In part that is because Delaware will have the chance to work with other consortium states to leverage greater volume of implementation and scoring. However, this new assessment will demand human scoring rather than computer scoring which will drive up costs. In the end, it will likely be close to the same expense, perhaps with a small savings, said Brian Touchette, director of DDOE’s Office of Assessment.
Because the new test goes into a deeper level of mastery – it will call on multiple sources of text for reading comprehension, and persuasive essay writing and math questions will not only look for the answer, but the steps of necessary equations – it will not only require more time and effort to score, but also to take. Smarter Balanced will present a significantly longer time commitment than the current DCAS when it is administered, but DDOE officials don’t see that as a problem. Students aren’t expected to lose any additional class time in the long run because they will be taking Smarter Balanced once during the year rather than the two to three times DCAS is currently administered.
This also means there will be fewer official scores for the state to analyze but, again, Murphy said he isn’t concerned.
First, Murphy said, there will be ongoing assessments for teachers to use to gauge student progress during the year in the run-up to the annual exam. Secondly, he said it isn’t necessary for the state to micro-manage what’s happening in the classroom. “We’ll have one set of scores. And that’s OK.”
During next year’s transition, Smarter Balanced scores will not be used as a part of the Delaware Performance Appraisal System (DPAS). In the interim, Murphy said the other measures of student growth will still be used for teacher evaluations and in the 2015-16 academic year, Smarter Balanced will be worked in to DPAS’ student growth component.
Jesse Parsley, a seventh grade special education math teacher at Milford Central Academy, said he’s glad the assessment won’t be applied to teacher evaluations next year, but he’s still concerned about the following year.
With just one test score on record, it may be difficult to measure growth without knowing how much the student lost in knowledge over the summer months. The measure will also mark one teacher’s progress against the other, not the same teacher’s impact on the student, Parsley said.
Parsley said he is also doing all he can to spread the word about Smarter Balanced development and implementation. He most recently helped host a “Take the Test Night” at his school. He said 18 teachers from his building attended.
“Sometimes we as teachers don’t take care of ourselves,” he said. “It’s important to take the time and increase professional development and advocate for yourself and find the answers you need.”
Parsley is aware of the many questions surrounding Common Core Standards and Smarter Balanced, specifically the level of control schools have on their own curriculum. He says he doesn’t see it as an issue.
“We are reviewing textbooks and developing and adjusting our curriculum (at the district and school level). We have the control and freedom to do that, the state isn’t doing it.”
Even with his concerns about Smarter Balanced as a growth measure, Parsley said, “I still think we’re heading in the right direction with Smarter Balanced.”
DDOE officials said they hope more teachers and parents will take the sample tests on Smarter Balanced’s website at http://www.smarterbalanced.org/sample-items-and-performance-tasks/ to see what the new assessment entails for both English language arts and mathematics.
In addition to the final field testing of Smarter Balanced, Delaware students will take DCAS for the last time in the spring. This year’s test is aligned with Common Core Standards, administrators said, but “retro-fitting” DCAS wasn’t a viable option in the long-term.
Touchette said it is common for states to implement new tests every five years or so for a number of reasons, whether those are curriculum- or technology-based.
In the case of Smarter Balanced, the assessment has been developed, aligned to Common Core Standards and will be tested by hundreds of thousands of students before it is implemented next year.
“It would take Delaware years and years to test at that level,” Touchette said.
In the end, the new exam’s results will be “more meaningful and sophisticated” for students, teachers and parents, Murphy said.
And if a student is struggling with proficiency, the assessment will adjust to pinpoint struggles or advancement. For example, if a fourth grade student is taking the test and is consistently answering questions correctly, the online program can pull questions from the fifth grade level to see how advanced the student might be. Conversely, if the student is getting most of the questions wrong, the exam will adjust to the third grade level to see precisely where the student begins to struggle.
Joe Willhoft, executive director of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, described the new test as “a conversation with the student,” rather than a static evaluation.
“This way, youngsters who are struggling academically don’t get frustrated with the testing experience and those are ahead don’t get bored,” Willhoft said. “Everyone is engaged and test results for all students are accurate.”
The work for teachers and students will be substantial following the first live year of Smarter Balanced. Based on previous Delaware student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as “the nation’s report card,” Murphy said a drop of student proficiency from 70 percent on DCAS to 40 percent on Smarter Balanced would not be shocking.
“The pill to swallow with that is we will have fewer children in the beginning years showing proficiency,” Murphy said. “Kids aren’t any less smart, it’s just a different test.”
While on DCAS there are roughly seven out of ten students measuring proficient in math and English language arts, just two out of ten are proving proficient in the SAT in the 11th grade, Murphy said. He referred to this as a “disconnect” which Smarter Balanced will address.
He does expect the scores to climb immediately.
“We have been working on this transition for more than three years, so our schools, our teachers, our principals have been transitioning their teaching styles, their materials, their Friday morning assessments, to align to the Common Core for years," said Murphy. "It’s not like you flip a switch one day and change the test and see how we can accelerate our students’ learning.”
“But we also know there’s been a runway for our teachers to be working toward these standards for multiple years and they will continue to drive toward those standards, he added. "we should see those proficiency levels rise almost immediately because we’ve been working on this.”