Turning what was supposed to be a spring break vacation into a field-testing week for a new exam wasn’t in anybody’s plans, but it became the reality last week in several north Arkansas school systems.
PARCC stands for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. The new assessment, or testing program, is based on the multistate Common Core education standards in math and English/ language arts that have been phased into Arkansas schools over three years.
The assessment will replace Arkansas’ long-standing Augmented Benchmark and End of Course exams beginning in the 2014-15 school year.
The 2015 exams measure individual student achievement. The new tests will also be used to determine whether a public school should be labeled as “achieving” or “needs to improve.” Additionally, the exam results will be a factor in evaluating teacher effectiveness.
Nearly all of Arkansas’ school districts and charter-school systems volunteered to field-test portions of the new exams this spring to help prepare for the spring 2015 version of the test. As a result, some 20,000 students across the Natural State will participate in the dress rehearsal of tests that will soon be given online a couple of times each school year.
There are several goals officials hope to achieve with the field tests, such as determining whether questions are clearly worded and whether a school’s computers can handle the demand. But the one function the practice test will not perform is generating scores. The field test will not produce any scores for students, schools, districts or the state.
“Don’t expect any results from it,” Megan Witonski, the state Department of Education’s assistant commissioner for learning services, said of the trial run. “The purpose of the field test is for us to assess how well the questions perform within an assessment-setting for students. And for districts, it is to inform them on how well they have prepared and organized.
“You don’t want your first go at a new test to occur in an operational year. You want to have had an experience with it. You want kids to have had an experience with it,” she said.
In the midst of the field tests, Arkansas public school students will also take the long-used Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course exams in math and literacy in grades three through eight and in algebra I, geometry and 11th-grade literacy one final time.
The results of those existing state tests will count and will be reported back to the students and their families. School and district results will be publicly reported, as they have been in past years.
The existing state tests are based on Arkansas’ education standards and not the Common Core State Standards that were developed by national committees.
In north Arkansas, where dozens of school districts were forced to cancel weeks of classes in December through early March because of wintry weather, makeup snow days during spring break have become ideal days to test the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
Other school districts will conduct the field tests at different points in a window that opens Monday and closes April 18.
Two of the four third-grade classrooms at Cave City Elementary School tried out a portion of the English/language arts test Tuesday morning, Assistant Principal Debbie Asberry said.
The third-graders took what is termed the “performance-based assessment” on Chromebook computers. The field test included a combination of question types, including multiple-choice and long-answer questions. Some test questions called for students to use their computer cursors to drag selected answers to another place on the screen.
“It went really well,” Asberry said of the 2½-hour morning test session. “We didn’t have any problems whatsoever. The kids were anxious and nervous, but once it was over they said, ‘Is that all there is to it?’”
But, no, that is not all there is to it. Those same two randomly selected classes of Cave City third-graders will take another field test in May, Asberry said.
The assessment - unlike the Benchmark and End-of-Course exams - consists of the “performance-based assessment” to be taken after 75 percent of instruction is completed in a school year, followed by an “end-of-year assessment” after 90 percent of instruction is completed, Witonski said.
The Cave City pupils who just completed the field test of the performance-based assessment will take the end of-year assessment - also in English/language arts.
The testing exercise is worth it, Asberry said.
“We wanted the option to pilot the test so we could see what it was going to be about, and so we could get our technology ready and so our kids could get comfortable with it,” she said.
The Cave City pupils in third and fourth grades have been using Chromebooks since early in the school year, in part to prepare for the new assessment. The campus has used iPads and netbooks in past years, Asberry said. One of the advantages of the Chromebooks over the iPads is that the Chromebooks have keyboards.
The Little Rock School District, the state’s largest district with about 25,000 students, also volunteered to participate in the field tests. A total of 2,541 students in the district’s five high schools, one alternative school, middle schools and in 25 of the 30 elementary schools were randomly selected by the test vendor, Pearson Assessment.
Some students will take parts of the overall math tests and others will take part of the English/language arts tests in grades three through eight, said Danyell Cummings, the district’s director of testing. The middle and high school students will be taking field tests in ninth through 11th grade English and in algebra I and II.
Some of the students will take the performance-based assessment in the coming days. Others will take the end-of year exams to be administered between May 5 and June 6.
The high school test-takers will take a paper-and-pencil version of the tests. Elementary and middle school students will take their exams online.
Not all students at a school will participate, and no student will take all sections of the test. Typically, just two classrooms at a selected grade will take a portion of the test, even if there are more than two classrooms of that grade at a school.
“We’ve been getting ready since January,” Cummings said. Preparations include installing and testing required software on computers at the schools. The district will rely on its desktop computers for the field testing but will add other devices for use next year when the number of test-takers will swell.
Cummings said she has monitored information about problems or quirks with the tests in places where the field testing is underway as a way to be better prepared. And district students have been taking practice exams to prepare for the field test.
Information has been prepared for parents to keep them abreast of the field tests.
In Arkansas and elsewhere in the country, there has been some opposition from parents and educator groups to the new Common Core State Standards and the exams based on the new standards.
Cummings said she had received one letter from a parent asking that a child not participate in the testing.
“We’re willing to work with any family,” Cummings said about testing concerns, but she added that the district must comply with state requirements for testing. “We have no control over that,” she added.
The Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness is one of two multistate groups that are developing exams based on the Common Core State Standards for their member states to use. The other is the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
The assessment is funded with a $186 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The new assessment’s website - www.parcconline.org. - includes a section on frequently asked questions about the consortium and the development of the exams. There are also sample questions from the exams and a daily blog updating viewers on the administration of the field tests in the member states. The website also includes copies of the questionnaires that students taking the field tests will be asked to complete.
The post-test surveys do not seek personal information, according to the website. The surveys ask students whether the field test was easier or harder than their classwork, whether the test directions were easy or difficult to understand, how often and what types of computers they use and, on the survey for the math tests, whether the online calculators were difficult to use.
Cummings, from the Little Rock district, said district leaders are prepared but also apprehensive about the field testing because of the newness of online testing and the possibility of glitches.
“Secretly, we would welcome problems,” she said. “That way we can work through them before next year, when the tests count.”
Witonski, the state’s assistant commissioner for learning services, shares the sentiment.
“We want to do the field testing,” she said, “so that when we do have problems we’ll know how to address them.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/30/2014