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Letter Report on Voluntary National Tests

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
COMMISSION ON BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AND EDUCATION
2101 Constitution Avenue
Washington, DC 20418

BOARD ON TESTING AND ASSESSMENT
202-334-3087
202-334-3584 FAX
Michael J. Feuer, Ph.D., Director

July 15, 1998


Secretary Richard W. Riley
U.S. Department of Education
Room 6263
600 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Mr. Secretary:

As you know, the National Research Council (NRC) has been conducting an independent evaluation of certain technical aspects of the development of items for the proposed Voluntary National Tests of fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics. To carry out this mandate, specified in P.L. 105-78 (November 1997), the NRC appointed us as co-principal investigators. We are working with NRC staff under the auspices and oversight of the NRC's Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) and soliciting input from a wide range of outside experts. Please note that we interpret our mandate as a request for technical review only, and we take no position on the overall merits of the Voluntary National Tests.

Under the NRC contract with the Department of Education, we are scheduled to issue a report of our first-year findings in September 1998. However, we have identified an issue that we believe can benefit from immediate attention, and we are sending this letter in the hopes of ensuring the best possible test development process. Our principal concern is with the timetable for item review and revision, which, if relaxed somewhat, would allow more time for the full benefit of those activities to be realized. This letter is based on our evaluation of the materials available to us as of early June 1998: we realize that because the development process is ongoing, some of the issues identified in this letter may have already been addressed by the time it is released. In the interest of providing constructive feedback, however, we choose to express our concerns now even if this proves to have been unnecessary, rather than delay until September and risk being too late to effect positive change.

Our letter is organized in three main sections: a brief discussion of the scope and purpose of the evaluation; a description of the workshop that focused on item quality; and our findings, conclusions, and recommendations. We trust this information will be helpful and interpreted in the spirit we intend, as a suggestion that more time be allowed for item review and revision.

Scope and Purpose


In his January 1997 State of the Union address, President Clinton called for the development of Voluntary National Tests (VNT) in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics as a means of providing information on the academic progress of American youth in relation to national and international benchmarks. Congress gave the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) exclusive authority to develop the VNT and asked the NRC to provide an independent evaluation of the development activities.

In this first phase of our evaluation (which is scheduled to culminate in a report in September 1998), we have focused largely on three aspects of the test development process and products: issues surrounding the test specifications and the NAEP frameworks; plans for the development and implementation of the pilot study scheduled for spring 1999; and preliminary evidence of the quality of possible test items. To date, we have observed laboratory-based talk-aloud item try-out sessions with students, reviewed design and development plans and reports, examined draft test items and scoring materials, and conducted three workshops in which additional experts with a wide range of skills and experience have contributed unique and invaluable input. This letter pertains exclusively to our concerns about the item review and revision schedule for the next few months; it is based on our most recent workshop (June 2-3, 1998).

VNT Item Development and Review Schedule


It is important to note that NAGB and its contractors for test development have not completed the development of candidate items for the VNT. Because of a 6-month delay in initiation of the project, NAGB, its prime contractor (the American Institutes for Research), and the subcontractors for reading and mathematics test development have faced a daunting and compressed schedule for test design and development. (Although the schedule for development, review, revision, and approval of materials has not been rigidly set, approximate dates have been specified.) Revised test specifications were approved by NAGB at its March meeting and item development continued thereafter. The subcontractors for reading and mathematics development relied on the NAEP frameworks, the VNT specifications, released NAEP items, and bias and sensitivity review guidelines in writing items. Each subcontractor appears to be following the development and quality control procedures used in its proprietary testing programs. After initial drafting, items then undergo review and revision.

The item review and revision process includes a set of sequential and overlapping steps:

1. initial review of items by the subcontractors for reading and mathematics development;
2. content review by the prime contractor and its consultants;
3. review by outside content experts;
4. trial evaluation of a subset of items in one-on-one talk-aloud sessions with students (called cognitive laboratories);
5. to the extent possible, provision of recommendations for item revision to item writers based upon summaries of information obtained from steps 1-4;
6. review of items for bias and sensitivity by consultants to the contractors;
7. revision of items by the item writers;
8. review of test items by NAGB; and
9. NAGB sign-off on test items.

Steps 1-5 above were to be completed by June 30th, so that revisions to at least a subset of the approximately 2,600 items were possible prior to bias review that was scheduled to take place July 6-8. This bias review and the previously provided review information was to be the basis for additional item revision prior to NAGB's review and approval. NAGB is scheduled to review items in three waves, one beginning July 15, the next beginning on July 22, and the final set beginning on July 29. Approval of items by the Governing Board will be sought at the November 1998 NAGB meeting. Approved items then will be assembled in draft test forms for the proposed pilot administration of the VNT in spring 1999. It is unclear what activities NAGB plans to undertake for its review between July 15 and the November meeting.

Workshop on VNT Item Development


Our concern with the scheduling of item review and revision activities results primarily from data obtained in our third workshop. On June 2 and 3, a group of outside experts with experience in the development and evaluation of conventional and performance-based test materials (see the list of outside experts at Attachment 1) examined and rated a subset of secure test items in their area of expertise. The test developers supplied a list of items that represented the VNT specifications for content coverage and item formats. We selected a total of 60 mathematics items from a pool of 120 items provided by the prime contractor. Similarly, we selected 6 reading passages with a total of 45 items from a pool of 12 reading passages with roughly 120 questions. The sample of items we selected matched the VNT specifications for the length of a test form as well as for content coverage and item formats.

These materials and the workshop participants' observations provided the data that led to this report. Because the items we examined in June were products of the initial stages of item development, we did not expect them to reflect the complete development process. Many items had been through content review, and a number were being tried out with small numbers of students to assess item clarity and accuracy. However, the items had not yet been reviewed for bias or sensitivity, revised by test writers, or submitted for NAGB review and approval.

Before examining the test materials, the experts, co-principal investigators, and NRC staff signed nondisclosure statements promising to protect the confidentiality of the materials. Consequently, specific illustrations of our findings cannot be provided without breaching the security of these materials. When analysis for the broader evaluation is complete, however, we and the NRC staff will be happy to share specific examples with NAGB members and staff who already have access to the secure test materials.

At the workshop, the experts independently identified the knowledge and skills likely to be measured by each item and attempted to match these to the content and skill outlines for the VNT. They also appraised item quality and identified ambiguities that might lead students to invalid responses (correct or incorrect). After the item rating exercise, the principal investigators and staff met jointly with the experts, NAGB, and the developers of the VNT to discuss issues of item quality and coverage and to discuss plans for item review and quality assurance. The principal investigators and staff also met separately with the experts for further discussion of the item materials.

Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations


Our findings, conclusions, and recommendations are based on our own evaluation of the information provided at the workshop, subsequent discussions, and the process and products of item development. Although we benefited greatly from the views of the experts with whom we worked, we stress that this report is solely the responsibility of the authors and the NRC. We also reiterate that these findings apply only to the materials available to us by early June.
  • The review plans for VNT items are appropriate and extend beyond procedures typically employed in test development.
    The plans for content review, student try-outs of items, and bias and sensitivity review appear rigorous and thorough. The plans for student try-outs, in particular, go well beyond item review procedures found in most test development programs. These tryouts include extensive probes to determine the validity of the students' scored responses and to identify problems that may lead to correct answers when students do not have the targeted knowledge or skill or lead to incorrect answers when they do.


  • The draft items we examined were at an early stage of development, and many of them need improvement.
    We and our experts found items with ambiguities and other problems of construction. In the case of reading items, for example, there were items for which there was not a clearly correct response, some with two possibly correct responses, and some with distracter options that might signal the correct answer. In addition, some items could possibly be answered without reading the associated passages, and others appeared to ask students to use supporting information for their response that was not in the text. Expert panelists flagged roughly half of the items available for our examination as requiring further review and possible revision.
    It is critical to keep this finding in proper perspective. First, it is common to find problems with a significant number of items early in the item development process: why else conduct rigorous item reviews if not to weed out items that do not pass muster? The VNT developers, in fact, expect that 15 percent of the items will be eliminated from consideration even before pilot testing and also expect that only one-third or one-fourth of the piloted items will be used in the initial forms to be field tested for possible operational use. Moreover, as specific items were discussed at the workshop, the test developers who were present largely agreed with our assessment of item problems and in several cases reported that they had earlier come to the same conclusions.
    Thus, we conclude that there has not been sufficient time for the test development contractors to act on weaknesses in the test items. This conclusion about the unrefined state of the items we reviewed is by no means a final assessment of their quality. Rather, it signals that a significant amount of review and revision will be required to achieve a final set of high quality items.


  • The items examined did not appear to represent the full range of knowledge and skills targeted by the VNT content and skill outlines.
    Although there were items that represented varied content areas and many of the less complex skill areas, few of the items in the sample were likely to assess higher order thinking skills, as required by the approved test specifications. It will not be easy to revise items to cover these important parts of the skill specifications or the subareas of knowledge that might be underrepresented.


  • NAGB and its development contractor have also not yet had time to determine the extent to which the pool of items being developed will enable reporting of student performance in relation to NAEP's achievement levels, a central goal of VNT development.
    NAGB has developed specific descriptions of the skills associated with NAEP's "basic," "proficient," and "advanced" achievement levels for fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics (see the Achievement Level descriptions at Attachment 2). The validity of the achievement levels, which has been a topic of considerable discussion, depends on whether the description of each achievement level matches the skills of students classified at those levels.(1) Comparing candidate VNT test items to the achievement level descriptions is an important step to ensure coverage of each achievement level. In the items we and our experts reviewed, there appeared to be a shortage of items tapping higher order skills. We urge NAGB and its contractors to determine whether additional time and development are needed to produce enough items that test skills at the advanced achievement level.


  • The current schedule does not provide sufficient time for the provision of item review and try-out results to item authors and for the revision of item materials to ensure their accuracy, clarity, and quality.
    Because of the current schedule, a number of review activities that are more logically conducted in succession are being conducted simultaneously. These include content reviews by the prime contractor and its consultants, reviews by content experts, and the item try-outs. Furthermore, very little time is available to act on the results from each step in the review process. For the student try-out results to be of full use in further item development, reports on specific items must be summarized and generalizations applied to the larger set of items not examined in student try-outs. Yet the schedule allowed less than a week between the conclusion of the cognitive laboratory sessions and the provision of feedback to the item writers. It also provided less than a week for revision (if this, indeed, occurs) of a large number of items prior to the bias and sensitivity review planned for July 6, and only another week between the bias and sensitivity review and submission of the first wave of items to NAGB for its final review beginning July 15.
    Given the large volume of items being developed, it appears unlikely that any of these steps-summarizing review and tryout results, responding to bias and sensitivity reviews, and item revision-can be adequately completed, let alone checked, within the 1-week time frame scheduled for each of them. In other testing programs with which we are familiar, such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the Medical College Admission Test, the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this review and revision process takes several months.

    These findings lead to our central conclusion: While the procedures planned for item review and revision are commendable, the current schedule for conducting review and revision appears to allow insufficient time for the full benefit of those procedures to be realized. This conclusion leads to our central recommendation: We urge NAGB to consider adjusting the development schedule to permit greater quality control, and we suggest that it may be possible to do so without compromising the planned date for the administration of pilot tests (spring 1999).
    Specifically:

    1. We recommend that NAGB consider whether the remaining time for refinement of item materials by VNT developers and for item review and approval by NAGB should be reallocated to allow more time for the developers' careful analysis of item review information and for the application of this input to the entire set of items. The period of time allocated for NAGB's review of item materials might be reduced correspondingly, to allow for full and complete attention to item revision and quality assurance by the test development contractors.

    2. We recommend that NAGB and its contractors consider efforts now to match candidate VNT items to the NAEP achievement level descriptions to ensure adequate accuracy in reporting VNT results on the NAEP achievement level scale.

    3. We recommend that NAGB and its contractors consider conducting a second wave of item development and review to fill in areas of the content and skill outlines and achievement level descriptions that appear to be underrepresented in the current set of items.

    We appreciate the opportunity to examine the development of the Voluntary National Tests and hope this interim letter provides formative and constructive feedback. We believe that if our recommendations are implemented, additional activity this summer and fall could improve the item review and revision process without delaying the planned pilot test in spring 1999. We would be happy to provide additional information on issues raised in this letter.

    Sincerely,

    Robert Hauser
    Co-Principal Investigator

    Lauress Wise
    Co-Principal Investigator


    c: Mr. Mark D. Musick
    The Honorable William F. Goodling
    The Honorable William L. Clay
    The Honorable James M. Jeffords
    The Honorable Edward M. Kennedy
    The Honorable Arlen Specter
    The Honorable Tom Harkin
    The Honorable John Porter
    The Honorable David Obey





    ENDNOTE
    (1) See:
    Leigh Burstein, Daniel Koretz, Robert Linn, Brenda Sugrue, John Novak, Eva L. Baker, and Elizabeth Lewis Harris (1996). Describing performance standards: Validity of the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement level descriptors as characterizations of mathematics performance. Educational Assessment 3(1):9-51.
    Robert L. Linn (1998). Validating inferences from National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement-level setting. Applied Measurement in Education 11(1):23-47.
    National Academy of Education (1996). Quality and Utility: The 1994 Trial State Assessment in Reading, Robert Glaser, Robert Linn, and George Bohrnstedt, eds. Panel on the Evaluation of the NAEP Trial State Assessment. Stanford, CA: National Academy of Education.
    U.S. General Accounting Office (1993). Educational Achievement Standards: NAGB's Approach Yields Misleading Interpretations. GAO/PEMD-93-12. Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office.
    (Back to document)



    ATTACHMENT 1

    Workshop on VNT Item Development

    The Foundry Building
    June 2-3, 1998

    Outside Experts


    Peter Afflerbach, Curriculum and Instruction, University of Maryland
    Lizanne DeStefano, Bureau of Educational Research, University of Illinois
    Roberta Flexer, Department of Education, University of Colorado
    John Guthrie, Department of Human Development, University of Maryland
    Patricia Kenney, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
    Marjorie Lipson, Department of Education, University of Vermont
    William Tate, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Other Participants


    Rebecca Adamson, Mathtech, Inc.
    Stephen Baldwin, National Research Council
    Carol Benjamin, National Assessment Governing Board
    Meryl Bertenthal, National Research Council
    Clayton Best, American Institutes for Research
    Mary Lyn Bourque, National Assessment Governing Board
    Mary Crovo, National Assessment Governing Board
    Marilyn Dabady, National Research Council
    Larry Feinberg, National Assessment Governing Board
    Michael Feuer, National Research Council
    Ray Fields, National Assessment Governing Board
    Robert Hauser, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Wisconsin
    Cadell Hemphill, National Research Council
    Mark Kutner, American Institutes for Research
    Archie LaPointe, American Institutes for Research
    Diane Leipzig, National Assessment Governing Board
    Karen Mitchell, National Research Council
    Patricia Morison, National Research Council
    William Morrill, Mathtech, Inc.
    John Olson, American Institutes for Research
    Audrey Pendleton, U.S. Department of Education
    Elizabeth Rowe, American Institutes for Research
    Terry Salinger, American Institutes for Research
    Sharif Shakrani, National Assessment Governing Board
    Gary Skaggs, National Assessment Governing Board
    Roy Truby, National Assessment Governing Board
    Don Wise, Mathtech, Inc.
    Lauress Wise, Co-Principal Investigator, Human Resources Research Organization



    ATTACHMENT 2


    Description of Reading Achievement Levels
    for Basic, Proficient, and Advanced Fourth Graders


    Basic performance in reading should include:

    • Determining what a story/informational text is about (i.e., topic, main idea)
    • Determining the main purpose for reading a selection
    • Identifying character(s), setting(s), conflict(s), or plot(s) in a story
    • Supporting one's understanding of a story/informational text with appropriate details
    • Explaining why one likes or dislikes what they have read [a reading]
    • Connecting material from a story/informational text to personal experiences
    • Making predictions about situations beyond the confines of the printed material
    • Maintaining a focus over the entirety of a story/informational text


    Proficient performance in reading should include:

    • Summarizing a story/
    • Recognizing an author's intent or purpose
    • Making simple inferences based on information provided in a story/informational text
    • Drawing a valid conclusion from a story/informational text
    • Determining the meaning of key concepts in the story/informational text and connecting them to the main idea
    • Recognizing relationships in a story/informational text (time order, cause/effect, compare/contrast)


    Advanced performance in reading should include:

    • Explaining an author's intent, using supporting material from the story/informational text
    • Describing the similarities and difference in characters, settings, and plots
    • Demonstrating an awareness of the use of literary devices, such as figurative language
    • Applying inferences drawn from a story/informational text to personal experiences
    • Extending the meaning of a story/informational text by integrating experiences and information outside of the text
    • Making and explaining a critical judgment of a story/informational text
    • Demonstrating an ability to adapt reading purpose to a variety of printed materials and/or writing styles



    Description of Mathematics Achievement Levels
    for Basic, Proficient, and Advanced Eighth Graders


    The five NAEP content areas are (1) numbers and operations, (2) measurement, (3) geometry, (4) data analysis, statistics, and probability, and (5) algebra and functions. Skills are cumulative across levels--from Basic to Proficient to Advanced.

    Basic 256
    Eighth-grade students performing at the basic level should exhibit evidence of conceptual and procedural understanding in the five NAEP content areas. This level of performance signifies an understanding of arithmetic operations--including estimation--on whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and percents.

    Eighth graders performing at the basic level should complete problems correctly with help of structural prompts such as diagrams, charts, and graphs. They should be able to solve problems in all NAEP content areas through the appropriate selection and use of strategies and technological tools--including calculators, computers, and geometric shapes. Students at this level also should be able to use fundamental algebraic and informal geometric concepts in problem solving.

    As they approach the proficient level, students at the basic level should be able to determine which of the available data are necessary and sufficient for correct solutions and use them in problem solving. However, these 8th graders show limited skill in communicating mathematically.

    Proficient 294
    Eighth-grade students performing at the proficient level should apply mathematical concepts and procedures consistently to complex problems in the five NAEP content areas.

    Eighth graders performing at the proficient level should be able to conjecture, defend their ideas, and give supporting examples. They should understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions. Students at this level are expected to have a thorough understanding of basic level arithmetic operations--an understanding sufficient for problem solving in practical situations.

    Quantity and spatial relationships in problem solving and reasoning should be familiar to them, and they should be able to convey underlying reasoning skills beyond the level of arithmetic. They should be able to compare and contrast mathematical ideas and generate their own examples. These students should make inferences from data and graphs; apply properties of informal geometry; and accurately use the tools of technology. Students at this level should understand the process of gathering and organizing data and be able to calculate, evaluate, and communicate results within the domain of statistics and probability.

    Advanced 331
    Eighth-grade students performing at the advanced level should be able to reach beyond recognition, identification, and application of mathematical rules in order to generalize and synthesize concepts in the five NAEP content areas.

    Eighth graders performing at the advanced level should be able to probe examples and counterexamples in order to shape generalizations from which they can develop models. Eighth graders performing at the advanced level should use number sense and geometric awareness to consider the reasonableness of an answer. They are expected to use abstract thinking to create unique problem-solving techniques and explain the reasoning processes underlying their conclusions.

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