Best Practices for State Assessment Systems, Part I Summary of a Workshop (2010) / Chapter Skim
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5 Opportunities for Better Assessment
5 Opportunities for Better Assessment
Pages 49-58
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From page 49... ...
Laurie Wise enumerated some of the possible opportunities, Ronald Hambleton described some of the challenges of supporting cross-state comparisons in a new era of innovative testing, and Rebecca Zwick concluded with some historical perspective on cross-state comparisons and suggestions for moving forward. IMPROvEMENT TARgETS Laurie Wise began with a reminder of the goals for improvement that had already been raised.
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From page 50... ...
. (Wise's sample included 15 state testing programs and a few test developers, and included only total contract costs, not internal staff costs.)
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From page 51... ...
That money, plus savings that winning states or consortia could achieve by pooling their resources, together with potential savings from new efficiencies such as computer delivery, would likely yield for a number of states as much as $13 million each to spend on ongoing development without increasing their own current costs, Wise calculated. Improved Cognitive Analyses Wise noted that the goal for the common core standards is that they will be better than existing state standards -- more crisply defined, clearer, and more rigorous.
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From page 52... ...
A common analogy is the formula for linking temperatures measured in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, but because of the complexity of the cognitive activities measured by educa tional tests, procedures for linking test scores are significantly more complex. In general, Hambleton explained, to compare the achievement of different groups of students it is necessary to have some comparability not only in the standards to be measured against, but in the tests and the curricula to which the students have been exposed.
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From page 53... ...
Even in the most strictly stan dardized testing program, it is nearly impossible to produce tests from year to year that are so clearly equivalent that scores can be compared without using linking procedures to make statistical adjustments. Even for the SAT, possibly the most thoroughly researched and well funded testing program in the world, psychometricians have not been able to get around the need to make statistical adjustments in order to link every different form of the test every year.
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From page 54... ...
With new sorts of assessments it will be critical to take seriously the need to expend resources to sustain the psycho metric features that are needed to answer the questions policy makers ask. New research on questions about vertical scaling and linking tests that use multiple assessment modes, for example, will be necessary to support the current goals for assessment reform.
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From page 55... ...
Later in the decade, the Clinton administration proposed a "voluntary national test" as a way of collecting com parative information on individual students, but political controversy doomed the project before it was implemented. The NAEP state assessments received an additional boost when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)
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From page 56... ...
One premise of the common core standards is that they will allow states to measure their students against the same expectations, but the rules permit states to supplement the core standards with up to 15 percent of additional content they value. To illustrate, Zwick suggested quantifying the standards and assuming that the 10 states in a consortium share 85 standards, and that each has its own 15 additional unique standards.
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From page 57... ...
It was noted that other countries have had success with common curricula and common tests and for some that seems like the best route. Others pointed out that NAEP already provides state comparisons, though without any particular alignment to the standards to which states are working and without scores for individual students.
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