Back to School 2016 Assessment Article: Facing Forwardby Tim Schell, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Waunakee Community School District, Chair, SAA Assessment Project Team With a new school year beckoning, this is a good time to review some important information on the state assessment system, a new look at high school graduate readiness, and formative assessment. As school leaders, we need to have a solid understanding of a balanced assessment system and be able to communicate effectively how our assessments truly inform instruction, provide a direct benefit to students, and provide necessary data for school improvement and external accountability requirements. Hopefully, this article is a useful resource for you and I look forward to seeing many of you at this year’s conventions. State Assessment Notes Unlike the last few years, we seem to be sailing into calmer waters for our state assessment system. The Forward Exam debuted as expected this past spring and the ACT suite and DLM continued from last year. The early literacy screener requirement has been loosened to provide for more flexibility in choosing the assessment, although PALS is still an option through CESA cooperative purchasing. The Forward exam window moves one week earlier in 2016-2017. Otherwise, there will be no major changes to the state assessment system for 2016-2017. DPI has received feedback from the field that more communication resources would be appreciated. In response, DPI has developed a set of resources on strategic assessment that build on the balanced assessment system concept. In addition, as district assessment coordinators know, DPI is now publish weekly DAC digests to provide timely information. Forward exam results for individual students and school summary reports became available in late July in the DRC portal, and should become available in WISEdash for districts in late August. The WISEdash dashboards will include more detail summary breakdowns of specific domains within ELA and mathematics to support school improvement and strategic planning. If you have looked at the distribution of your Forward exam data by performance level, you will notice a reduction in the percentage of students at the advanced level compared to last year’s Badger exam. The percentage of students in the advanced level is more in line with the NAEP aligned cut scores for the later years of the WKCE. This is a statewide norm as Wisconsin has chosen again to hew to the more stringent NAEP thresholds instead of the lower cut scores from the Smarter Balanced consortium. These more rigorous cut scores were also applied to the Science and Social Studies exams. For high schools, principals recently received the ACT graduate report for the class of 2016. This is the first cohort with a graduate report where all students took the statewide ACT as juniors. There should be some minor differences between the junior and graduate scores for this group of students as the graduate report is based on each student’s most recent ACT test score, not necessarily their March 2015 ACT test score.
UW System Remediation Report Wisconsin ACT 28 contained a new requirement this fall for the University of Wisconsin System to provide a report to the legislature and DPI on the number of students placed in remedial classes in English or Mathematics for each high school. DPI will share this information with districts. This is a new report that high school principals and district leaders will want to understand. As of this writing a template for the ACT 28 report is not available, but there are some things we can anticipate based on the statute and on UW System reports on remediation. The remediation report is likely to present data we have not seen before. Some high schools have submitted graduate files to the UW System placement office and received their graduates’ summary results on the English, Mathematics, and world language placement tests. Some high schools have been using the Early Math Placement Test (EMPT) for predictive data on student readiness for college coursework. The ACT 28 report is different as it will report on students placed into remedial, non-credit bearing, coursework at UW campuses, instead of placement exam scores. This is an important distinction because each UW campus sets its own cut scores for remediation. The same placement test score might place a student into a remedial course at one campus and into a credit bearing course at another campus. These differences can be significant. The April 2013 Remedial Education Report of the UW System noted that “According to the Center for Placement Testing, the variation among institutions is such that if the cutoff score for one of the comprehensive institutions were used to place all the students who took the math placement test, about 4% of the UW System incoming class would be required to take remedial math. If the cutoff score for another comprehensive institution were used, over 40% would be required to take remedial math.” Whether a student is placed into remedial courses depends both on their performance on the placement exam and where they enroll, so the information in the ACT 28 report will not be an apples to apples comparison across high schools. Act 28 set a requirement that high schools must have at least six students placed into remedial courses to be listed in the report. It is very possible that many high schools will not be listed due to the size of their graduating class, the number of graduates matriculating at UW System campuses, or the previously noted combination of exam performance and campus cut scores. There is a consensus that we want to reduce the number of students taking remedial courses. When a student is required to take a remedial, non-credit bearing course, there is an impact on the student, the campus, and the general public. This problem affects us all and many stakeholders, including public schools, need to be part of the problem solving process. The Act 28 report will hopefully help advance the conversation constructively, but it will not be the final word in depicting the challenge. Use this report as another lens on whether your graduates are college and career ready, but understand that there is more to your school’s data than might appear at first glance.
Growing in Formative Assessment As school leaders, we need to be familiar with state assessments and accountability measures like the Act 28 remediation report. These visible measures, however, do not themselves improve student learning. Rather, it is by growing in formative assessment practices that we can make a difference for our students. Formative assessment holds a very important role in any assessment system, whether we call it a balanced assessment system or strategic assessment system. Both formative assessment and feedback place in the top ten evidence based practices in John Hattie’s “Visible Learning.” It is no surprise that we often discuss how to increase the presence of formative assessment in our schools, but what do we mean when we refer to formative assessment? Formative assessment takes many forms. It ranges from informal, sometimes opportunistic, observations of student performance to carefully designed tasks. It can be something as simple as a red cup, green cup system in a classroom for students to report their understanding of a teaching point. It can be a pre-assessment activity at the start of a lesson, or an exit slip at its conclusion. Checks for understanding are a type of formative assessment that provide valuable information for learning. At a minimum, they provide the teacher with information about where students are, how much re-teaching is needed for individual students, and possibly where a lesson needs adjustment. We hope they also provide moments of self-reflection for the learner. As valuable as checks for understanding are, we should be eager to use them as our formative assessment foundation and build from there to complete formative assessment processes. In a formative assessment process, the check for understanding is just the beginning and is accompanied by immediate feedback to the learner. In a fully developed formative assessment process, students are provided opportunity to act on this immediate feedback through opportunities to relearn, rework, and other differentiated activities. Purposefully incorporating a complete formative assessment process into a lesson requires planning, ideally in collaboration with teaching colleagues to pool expertise and share the planning work. Formative assessment collaboration also provides opportunities to discuss common expectations for student performance and how all our students are learning. For those of you whose schools have incorporated DuFour and Eaker’s PLC model, these will be familiar concepts. If you are looking to add a title or two for your professional reading on this topic, I recommend “Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms” by Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy. I believe you will find it worth your time and possibly a future book study for your school. Best wishes for all our formative growth as school leaders in the 2016-2017 school year!
References Leahy S., & Wiliam, D. (2015) Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms. West Palm Beach, FL. Learning Sciences International. DuFour, R., DuFour, R., and Eaker, R. (2008) Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: New Insights for Improving Schools. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning. New York, NY: Routledge University of Wisconsin System (2013) Remedial Education Report. Madison, WI University of Wisconsin System (2015) Report on Remedial Education in the UW System: Demographics, Remedial Completion, Retention, and Graduation. Madison, WI Read more at: |