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March 25, 2009
Under pressure to score tests faster, a proposal to scrap writing
Next year, the state’s English tests could be missing one crucial component: writing.
That’s the conclusion that educators are drawing after the Board of Regents weighed a proposal earlier this month to eliminate the open-ended question section of the state’s standardized tests — the only part of the third through eighth grade testing regime that asks students to write out their answers in sentences.
The proposal is one of several ideas the Board of Regents, the state panel that sets New York’s education policy, is considering in order to speed up the test-grading process, following a new federal regulation ordering states to tell schools sooner whether or not they are meeting states standards. (State test scores play a large part in making that decision.) Changing the way the tests are graded could also cut costs.
The Regents have been studying how to meet the new federal requirement for almost a year. The prospect of scrapping writing first surfaced publicly when the Regents published the findings of a survey the board conducted to study the question. Of 22,000 parents and educators surveyed, 85% said the essay questions should remain.
Two other proposals are also on the table. One would have schools give the tests earlier in the year, a change educators said would give them less time to prepare students and make the tests a poor judge of the teacher’s performance. Another proposal would hire an outside vendor grade the tests, rather than local New York teachers. More than three-quarters of teachers said in the poll that they prefer local or regional scoring to the vendor option. Some teachers said they appreciate grading as a chance to get a better understanding of the test.
But it’s the change to the English test that’s attracted the most disappointment. “It would be a disaster if they took those questions off,” said Deborah Reck, the CEO and co-founder of The Writers’ Express, a Boston-based nonprofit that supports writing instruction, including some classes in the city. Overburdened teachers would spend less time teaching writing if they knew their students wouldn’t be tested on it, she said.
Bronx middle school English teacher Jordan Kutcher is one of those teachers. At a school whose test scores are low, Kutcher spends two months prepping students for the state exam. Knowing what’s on the exam helps her choose what to focus on, she said. “I can see the argument that [changing the test] could lead to less writing instruction, which is a bad thing,” she said.
Lynette Guastaferro, the executive director of Teaching Matters, a non-profit based in the city, said eliminating writing would make the test less rigorous. “I’m not in favor of throwing out the section that I think tests higher-order thinking skills,” she said.
One policy analyst told me it’s possible that the state could find better ways to make scoring more efficient. Bill Tucker, chief operating officer at the D.C. think tank Education Sector and the author of a recent report on the future of testing, said that the state could cut scoring costs substantially by requiring each essay to be read only once — by a human. Then, rather than getting a second pair of eyes to check that score, a computer could do the corroboration.
Only if there is a discrepancy between the two scores would a second human review both grades, Tucker suggested. (This is how the essay section of the GRE, taken by applicants to graduate school, is being graded as of this year.)
The Board of Regents has yet to decide the fate of open-ended state test questions. “There was a discussion,” said State Education Department spokesman Tom Dunn about the Regents’ March 16 meeting. “But no conclusions were made.”
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March 25th, 2009 8:28 pm
The writing part of the ELA is really the only authentic part, as far as assessment goes, in my opinion. I have students who can answer multiple choice questions but the reality of their skills comes out when you see their writing. I am not in favor of all the assessment we do, but I can’t believe they’d consider scrapping the writing. I would definitely focus less on writing, and in fact, I would be expected to do so by the administration, not because I’d want to. Wasn’t the all-MC CTB scrapped in part because there was a need for something more authentic?
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March 26th, 2009 10:46 am
I agree, letting go of the writing portion would be a mistake, making the test more prone to random guessing and less about demonstrable skills and knowledge. A bigger mistake would be moving testing earlier in the year. As it is, the ELA test is in January, the middle of the year, making it difficult to know if a student’s performance is attributable to his or her education that year or the year before. If anything, the tests should be moved towards the end of the year and lumped together into one or two testing weeks. The current system distorts the curriculum with schools overemphasizing one subject for months, then switching to another in anticipation of testing dates. Putting the tests at the end of the year would allow them to serve as summative assessments of that year’s overall instruction. Finally, it’s insane to let teachers continue correcting these tests. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that school’s send their least effective staff members to training sessions, and many are not qualified to evaluate student responses. And letting schools score their own Regents exams is ridiculous. How seriously can we take those results. If we’re serious about accountability, a vendor is more likely to provide reliability across the state. Moreover, in this day and age, technology should be easily solving these problems with computer adaptive testing to identify specific skill deficits and essay scoring that is suprisingly robust.
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March 26th, 2009 9:44 pm
This is why yearly testing is a problem… it leads to lower quality tests given more often, because developing and scoring tests that actually include semi-authentic tasks (like written answers, lab components, etc.) is crazy time-consuming and expensive.
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March 26th, 2009 10:14 pm
It is possible to do it half the cost and half the time by using a computer and a human grader (and if there is a difference a second human grader) instead of two human graders and then if there is a difference a third human grader.
It is how the GMAT is scored. Innovation made possible by technology.. is the way to better assessments. Anyone out there interested in piloting this idea in New York with Teaching Matters. I do not agree that there shouldnt be yearly tests. Assessments need to be tied to teachers.. so we can see who is actually moving kids in reading and writing. The quality of the teacher makes ALL the difference because its the teacher that matters the most. -
March 28th, 2009 2:36 pm
In the name of expedience for the testing machine, this proposal takes schools further in the wrong direction.
I find that I rarely get asked to do staff development to “bring the scores up.” Increasingly I’m asked to help teachers create more engaging learning environments for students.
While NCLB began with the admirable goal of narrowing demographic performance gaps and putting an end to sorting kids on the “bell curve,” it may be doing just the opposite. Many of our schools are now compelled to force feed the content required for “adequate progress” as measured by standardized state tests. Does test prep = academic “feed-lot?”
Too little time is left for student-centered, project-based learning that allows students to work at the upper level of Bloom. Innovation requires much trial and error (Bloom’s evaluation). Learning to self-assess your problem solving approach is not a skill fostered in multiple-choice test-prep environment.
NCLB correctly put the focus on student achievement. Our students will need a strong foundation in core concepts. But schools can’t be filled with routine tasks. They need to be fluid environments focused on helping students take responsibility for thinking and problem solving where there sometimes isn’t a right answer.
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March 28th, 2009 7:27 pm
Quite honestly the essays on the English language Regents are the most awkward, stilted essays I’ve ever seen. They are not created to teach students how to write really good essays but considered easier to score. Lousy essay formats like Critical Lens don’t help kids write well, they teach them poorly. It is actually possible to teach kids to write without making them take a standardized test on it.
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March 28th, 2009 7:32 pm
Is there a standardized test that measures…
Imagination?
Inquisitiveness?
Creativity?
Problem-solving skills?
Social development?
Interest in school?Effectiveness of dogma?
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