When it comes to the raucous debate over standardized testing, cooler heads might just prevail. In a recent move, PARCC announced changes to its exams starting in 2015–16. PARCC is a consortium of states working to design assessments aligned to the Common Core standards in math and English language arts; Ohio and ten other states administered PARCC for the first time in the 2014–15 school year. Dr. Richard A. Ross, Ohio’s superintendent of public instruction, sits on its governing board.
On May 20, the governing board voted in favor of two key changes that should alleviate some of the logistical burdens schools faced when administering these exams: eliminating one of the two “testing windows” and reducing the amount of testing time by roughly ninety minutes in all tested grades.
Collapsing two testing windows into one
The spring 2015 testing window for PARCC extended from mid-February to mid-May. That’s a long time. Of course, schools were not required to administer exams throughout the full testing window—they could use as few or as many of the days within the window as they needed. But for students, parents, and educators, the three-month window probably made “testing season” feel unusually long and drawn out. (In contrast, Ohio’s old state exams were administered over the course of roughly one month.) It also meant that testing interrupted classroom instruction for more of the school year—and earlier.
The reason for the long testing window was fairly simple: The assessment system included two exams. The first, the “performance-based assessment” (PBA), was given in February–March, and the second— the “end-of-year assessment” (EOY)—was given in April–May. The PBAs focused on students’ application of knowledge and skills (e.g., solving multi-step problems, explaining mathematical reasoning), while the EOYs focused more on traditional assessment items like reading comprehension or straightforward multiple-choice math problems. See for yourself the differences in the sample PARCC exams.
But starting in spring 2016, PARCC will be administered in one thirty-day testing window, occurring in the traditional testing period of April–May. Importantly, while the earlier PBA testing window is erased, some of PARCC’s performance-based tasks will be preserved in next year’s summative exam.
Reducing the amount of testing time
In response to concerns about overtesting, PARCC will reduce the amount of testing time on each of its subject-area exams. Specifically, the maximum amount of testing time allotted for each subject-area assessment will fall by roughly forty-five minutes. This means that testing time will fall by about ninety minutes per year for students in the tested grade levels (i.e., grades 3–8 and high school).
The drop in testing time means that in 2016, Ohio students will still sit for four to five hours on a math or English language arts assessment. (The time allotments for each subject-area assessment vary depending on grade level.) Next year’s PARCC exam, while shorter than the 2015 edition, will remain longer than Ohio’s old assessments, which clocked in at 2.5 hours per subject-area assessment. Thus, the slimmed-down version of PARCC will fall somewhere between the time needed to take this year’s edition of PARCC and Ohio’s old state tests—not a bad place to be.
Balancing an assessment’s value and burden
There’s a great chart in a July 2014 WestEd report on K–12 assessments prepared for the Colorado Department of Education. On the vertical axis is the word “value”; on the horizontal axis is “burden.” The two dimensions—value versus burden—is an intuitive way to think about the trade-offs in state assessment programs.
On the one hand, we want standardized exams that add value by providing essential (and actionable) information for parents and policymakers. Longer, more probing assessments typically yield a clearer understanding of a students’ true knowledge and abilities within a content area. (As Harvard professor Daniel Koretz takes great pains to point out, standardized exams capture a sample of knowledge, abilities, and behaviors within a larger domain.) PARCC, with its emphasis on demanding performance-based tasks, is designed to provide a richer, clearer understanding of the true skills and abilities of students—that’s the distinct advantage of PARCC over the old fill-in-the-bubble assessment regime.
But on the other hand, we also need to be careful that standardized exams don’t put an unnecessary burden on schools, eating into instructional time and creating scheduling headaches. One could imagine a technically “perfect” exam that would also be impractical to administer due to schools’ constraints on time and technology—and opposed by parents and citizens. At the end of the day, policymakers—and test designers—need to find the optimal ground between maximizing assessments’ value and minimizing their burden.
After a first round of testing, PARCC has re-calibrated—wisely, it would appear—its value/burden equation. The governing board of PARCC has altered the exam in order to relieve some of the testing burden that schools face, though the abridgement could diminish the desirable technical properties of the longer, more in-depth exam, as PARCC advisor Robert Brennan notes. Even with the changes, PARCC should still be considered far and away superior to Ohio’s old assessments. Recall that Ohio’s old tests were weak, largely multiple-choice tests pegged to an abysmal proficiency standard—exactly what most Ohioans don’t find valuable and want to get away from.
The question now is what, if anything, the state legislature will do. Before the PARCC revisions were announced, the Ohio House—clearly frustrated by this year’s rocky testing season—passed a bill (HB 74) which, if enacted, would forbid the administration of PARCC. (It would require the Ohio Department of Education to procure another assessment.) The legislation has been sent to the Senate.
State lawmakers, however, should take note of the commendable rebalancing that PARCC is undertaking. The governing board of PARCC has shown itself to be reasonable. Let’s hope the Ohio legislature will exercise wisdom and good judgment as well.
