Arkansas education leaders on Friday expressed confidence in the state-mandated ACT Aspire exams as indicators of individual student readiness for college and careers, and overall academic performance of schools.
In response to questions, however, Arkansas Department of Education staff agreed that more information to parents is necessary to better explain to them the meaning of their students' test results.
The annual Aspire results in third-through-10th grade math and literacy subjects are included in calculating each school's accountability score, which in turn is used to apply an A to F letter grade to every school. Top-achieving schools are eligible for state financial awards of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Arkansas Board of Education members held a work session Friday to review the Aspire testing program, prompted in part by ACT Inc.'s decision earlier this year to raise the minimum cut-scores necessary that students must earn to achieve the desired "Ready" or "Exceeding Ready" levels in English/language arts and STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
The higher English/language arts cutoff score caused the Education Board to approve rules this week to slightly lower the state's A-to-F grading scale for school performance. That was done to offset the English/language arts score change. The English/language arts score is a factor in the calculation, but the STEM score is not.
Also of concern, board members said at the Friday session, were complaints from some educators that the Aspire tests -- produced by the same company that produces the ACT college entrance exam -- are not aligned to the state's education standards, which are the concepts and skills that state educators have determined must be taught and learned in each grade.
Education Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne questioned Education Department staff Friday about the meaning of the results. She wanted to know whether a student's test result indicates their being on track for college or indicates how an Arkansas student is achieving compared with others in the same grade who took the same test in Arkansas or nationally.
Zook said there is "a disconnect" on what the public thinks it is getting from the test results and what it is actually getting.
Stacy Smith, the state Education Department's assistant commissioner for learning services, said she believes the Aspire results for a school are "a true reflection" of how schools are doing academically and one of several available measures on how individual students are achieving.
Smith also told the board that ACT Inc. raised the Aspire English/language arts and STEM cutoff scores at each grade to better prepare students for ultimately scoring well on the college entrance exam at the 11th grade.
"They are continuing to back-map down," Smith said about linking the ACT college entrance exam to the Aspire tests, using the U.S. Department of Education term for starting with a desired end result and working backwards to achieve it. "At this point, ACT is not comfortable nor am I comfortable in saying that, absolutely, how a student performs in third grade on the Aspire is predictive of how they will score in 11th grade. But that is the intent of the back-mapping."
Giving the college entrance exam to all high school juniors "is a win for all our students," Smith said, adding that it may be one of the best available ways of comparing achievement levels of Arkansas students to students nationally.
A lot of other states are producing their own tests to hold schools accountable for student learning, Smith said, which is what Arkansas did for many years.
Some states are giving tests developed by one or the other of two state coalitions, she said. Arkansas was part of the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers coalition but dropped out of that initiative in 2015 in large part because the spring and end-of-year exams were so time-consuming for students and faculties.
ACT Inc. has identified minimum scores by subject area on its college entrance exam that are meant to indicate a student's chances of earning a B or a C in a freshman college course in a corresponding subject.
A student who scores an 18 on the English section of the ACT, for example, has a 50 percent chance of earning a B and a 75 percent chance of earning a C in college freshman English, according to the test-maker. On the science section of the test, students need to earn at least a 23 on a scale of 1 to 36 to have a 50 percent chance of earning a B and a 75 percent chance of earning a C in college biology.
That score goes up to 26 for a STEM score if a student aspires for Bs and Cs in college calculus, chemistry, biology, physics and engineering, Smith told the Education Board.
Similarly, an English/language arts score of 20 on the ACT gives a student a 50-50 chance of a B and a 75 percent chance of a C in a slate of courses that include history, economics, sociology, psychology as well as English.
The state has in the past year initiated widespread training of teachers in the science of reading. Smith said that reading instruction has been unchanged for more than 20 years and that she is hopeful that the training will pay off with higher scores. State education leaders are also delving into math instruction and strategies, she said.
Metro on 08/11/2018