By Robert Meyer and Claudia Gentile
With encouragement from the federal government, many state education agencies are asking a common question: Is it time to rethink how we test our students? Rather than implementing an assessment to focus on one goal, these states are exploring ways to innovate their assessment system so they can meet many goals.
In practice, this might mean redefining the scope of state assessments. For example, instead of using one assessment to provide feedback for instruction, another to measure student growth across the school year, and a third to compare achievement across years to monitor program effectiveness, some states are wondering: Can we structure our assessments to meet all these goals?
Because this is top of mind for many of our states, it’s top of mind for the Central Comprehensive Center. Through our research, we’ve discovered there’s a lot happening. Some states are making changes to their assessments to better support student learning, while others are focusing on providing better quality measures of student growth and achievement.
While many of these states have a common goal, the path of innovation each state is taking is varied. For that reason, we’re launching a blog series that will explore this complex work. Our series will share our reflections on:
- Designing an effective state assessment and accountability system
- Improving existing state assessment and accountability systems
- Improving the validity and reliability of assessments and accountability analytics based on assessment data, while reducing testing time
- Recognizing which components of an assessment work well
- Identifying key issues to move the work forward
Stay tuned!