The Tri-State Alliance and CACSA hosted a conference call on July 23rd to discuss testing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the interruption in learning from remote learning last the spring, and potential disruptions this year, there are likely to be wide differences in what students have learned. Most educators will try to evaluate students’ learning gaps as they design instruction for this school year. This assessment is important to teaching, but data from formative assessments should not be used to authorizers for high-stakes accountability purposes. This is the latest Tri-State conference call in our series addressing COVID-related authorizing issues. A video of the conference call is available here.
Schools face complex challenges choosing and implementing assessment strategies that can inform their teaching. While data from this type of assessment will be difficult enough for educators to apply in their own instruction, assessment experts explain that data from such assessments would be inappropriate for accountability and oversight purposes.
On the call, participants talked with Drs. Julie Oxenford-O’Brian and Kent Seidel, both from the University of Colorado at Denver’s School of Education and Human Development, about challenges with testing and strategies to support educators during the crisis through the appropriate use of formative assessment. Interim assessments, for example, are not good for measuring gaps in student learning.
Assessments need to be examined to understand whether they can be administered remotely, or which parts can be used during social distancing. There are also risks based on the types of adjustments people make based on learning gaps, and less-experienced teachers are likely to need more help and guidance on how to incorporate the resulting data into their teaching.
The discussion addressed recommendations from the Association of Colorado Education Evaluators (ACEE) regarding state-mandated assessments of Kindergarten readiness and early literacy. A google doc folder available here has background materials from ACEE and their recommendations.
With the break in state tests, authorizers are considering how to use other data that may be available, but assessment experts recommend against using formative assessments and other local tools for high stakes. Participants discussed various strategies, including virtual site-visits. Matt Meyers, from DPS, shared several tools they are using for their virtual site visits, including their rubric, a template for a letter to the school, and a sample schedule. He also recommended specific practices, like daily “exit tickets” that can be used by schools to gather real-time feedback on student engagement and learning.
Seidel and Oxenford-O’Brian explained that schools and districts with large banks of materials that they use to measure student progress before the pandemic were in a better position to explore student learning during the crisis. Educators were able to use these resources to dive deeper into student needs when these tools were linked to what they would ordinarily be teaching. They referenced places like the Denver School of Science and Technology, which had a comprehensive approach; and the Westminster school district, because of their long-standing work on outcome-based approaches to school organization. Such work was likely to be more difficult in a setting that didn’t have systems in place before the crisis, but people did suggest seeking materials that help educators without forcing them to invent everything they need on the fly.