State Designs Tests to Score Each Student
A new statewide student testing program, requiring youngsters to perform specific tasks like writing an essay, solving a math problem or drawing an electrical circuit instead of answering multiple-choice questions, is being designed and will be tried out next spring.
At the insistence of Gov. Pete Wilson, the new tests will provide scores for individual students as well as for schools. The old CAP (California Assessment Program) tests, knocked out of the budget last year by former Gov. George Deukmejian, yielded scores for schools but not for individuals.
“This gives us consumer accountability,” said Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s secretary for child development and education. “The governor’s concern has been that the testing system should be able to report to the parent, the child and the teacher just how the child is performing.”
DiMarco called the new program, tentatively titled the Pupil Assessment System (PAS), “a major first step toward ultimately having a system that will allow us to know what a student has learned and whether he can apply it.”
The results will be reported to the students and their parents and will measure how they are performing in comparison to others at their grade level, but will not determine students’ success in class or their promotion to the next grade level. Traditional grading methods will continue to do that.
State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said he was “very excited about this whole approach. . . . We have sophisticated curriculum frameworks, solid textbooks and other instructional materials to teach the curriculum and now we’ve got the assessment piece.”
Legislation to create the assessment system was authored by state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara).
Eventually, PAS will test students in the fourth, fifth, eighth and 10th grades, in reading, writing, mathematics, history and science. Only eighth-graders will be tested this year, mostly with the old CAP tests. Initially, Wilson wanted to test pupils at every grade level each year, but that proved to be too expensive.
Next spring, there will be large-scale field testing of the various examinations, and education officials hope that the entire program will be in place by spring, 1993.
The new assessment system will cost at least $32.5 million a year within five years, while the CAP tests would have cost only $9.6 million had they been given this year.
But DiMarco noted that the state spends at least $19 billion a year on elementary and secondary education, adding, “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend $30 million or even $100 million to find out if that $19 billion is being spent properly.”
The most unusual aspect of the new approach is its emphasis on performance-based tests, instead of the multiple-choice questions that have been the staple of the testing world for many years.
Many educators have come to believe that multiple-choice tests “corrupt the curriculum,” as one California researcher put it, because teachers are under great pressure to increase test scores, and therefore “teach to the test” instead of making sure their students understand the material.
As a consequence, there is a national movement toward performance-based testing, called in educational jargon “authentic assessment” or “curriculum-imbedded assessment.”
For instance, one of the new California tests asks a fifth-grader to locate the 13 American colonies on a map and write a short essay describing the differences among the New England colonies, middle colonies and southern colonies.
Another test, this one for 10th-graders, asks the student to read a subtle short story and then write “journal” entries that describe the student’s responses to various passages in the story.
“We have to give them something that will challenge them, not just ask them to spend 30 seconds on a problem” said Dale Carlson, director of assessment for the state Department of Education. “You don’t solve problems in 30 seconds in the real world.”
Another unique element is that students will be tested not on how they happen to perform on a given day but on their best in that subject throughout the year. To do this, students will compile “portfolios” of their best work for evaluation.
“It’s like the artist’s portfolio, where he keeps his best paintings,” said Marilyn Whirry, a high school English teacher in Manhattan Beach who has been using this approach for years. “It’s so good for the youngsters. You can tell so much about how the youngster writes and reads and thinks. It’s the best kind of assessment.”
However, multiple-choice questions will not disappear from the statewide program, Carlson said, because they are still the best way to evaluate certain skills in some subjects and because they are much cheaper than tests based on the ability to perform certain tasks.
But the emphasis, increasingly, will be on finding out if students can perform laboratory experiments, solve math problems and write and think clearly, none of which can be adequately tested through multiple-choice questions, the state’s educational Establishment has come to believe.
Performance-based testing, carried on throughout the school year will place an added burden on many teachers.
But Del Weber, president of the California Teachers Assn., said teachers generally favor the new approach and are willing to do the extra work “as long as the program is properly funded.”
“Every time there is a new and novel idea for reform--and this happens on the average of about once a year--we say, ‘Fine, we can do this if we get the money to do it,’ ” Weber said. “But often we don’t and then the teacher is stuck with an impossible task.”
Weber also expressed concern that individual student scores might become the basis for teacher evaluations that, in turn, could lead to the kind of “merit pay” system Wilson has spoken about favorably.
Rating teachers on the basis of their students’ scores on statewide tests is unfair, Weber said, because “schools are different; kids come from different social and economic backgrounds.”
Professor Edward H. Haertel, a testing expert at the Stanford University education school, said the new statewide approach is “very promising” but warned that “the biggest questions still have to be answered: Do we really have the ability to construct tests like this and get them into the field and then score them properly?”
Groups of teachers all over the state are writing questions for the tests. They will be reviewed by advisory committees of experts in the various subjects before they are sent to schools for use in pilot studies.
But it isn’t known whether these questions will test the kinds of skills the state wants to measure.
Scoring will be difficult because it will be done by hundreds of teachers all over the state, not by the kind of high-speed scanning devices that scored the multiple-choice CAP tests. The problem will be to maintain consistency in the scoring.
The need to produce individual scores “will put even more pressure on the scoring system, since the results must be replicable,” Haertel said.
At first, the state Department of Education will probably depend on regional panels of specially trained teachers to do the scoring. Eventually, however, it is hoped that individual classroom teachers will score the tests, at least in some subjects.
“It is very difficult but it can be done if teachers are given enough in-service training,” said Marilyn Whirry, the Manhattan Beach high school English teacher.
The education department also must produce performance standards for the various subjects and grades, standards against which individual student performance will be measured.
“This is the heart of the whole thing,” Carlson, the department’s testing director, said. “But these standards don’t exist at this point and haven’t existed in the United States for many years.”
An exception is the assessment of writing skills that the department has been doing for several years. Carlson hopes other performance standards can be built on the lessons learned from the writing tests.
The new plan also calls for expanded use of the six Golden State examinations, which high-achieving students take at the high school level in algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology and chemistry.
In 1990, when the state picked up part of the cost, about 180,000 college-bound California youngsters took these tests.
This year, local school districts had to pick up the cost and only 38,000 students took the tests.
Next year, the state will pay for all six tests and Carlson expects hundreds of thousands of high school students to take them.
The new law also makes Honig’s department responsible for reviewing and approving privately manufactured tests that school districts use--a provision that has made test makers nervous.
David Deffley, president of the company that produces the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, the most widely used private test in California, said he and other test makers are concerned that the state might impose a complex approval process similar to that used for textbooks and other instructional materials.
“I’m not in the textbook business, but I’m not sure the state has benefited from that,” Deffley said.
He said Honig and other education department officials have not yet made it clear how the new state approval process will work.
“But I have my guard up,” Deffley said. “I’m concerned that the department might want to control all the tests in the state.”
Quiz Questions
New “performance-based” tests for grade school students are being designed by state education officials and will be tried out for the first time in the spring. In addition to multiple-choice questions, the new tests will require youngsters to perform specific tasks, such as writing an essay, solving a math problem or drawing an electrical circuit. Here are some of the questions from the English and history sections of pilot tests. The first question is for fifth-grade students, the rest are for students in grades 10 and 11. Question
Study the outline map of the United States. A Shade the areas where the 13 colonies were located.
B Label the three groups of colonies: New England colonies, middle colonies, and southern colonies.
C Write a short essay comparing and contrasting the three groups of colonies.
In your short essay, be sure to tell: * What the geography and climate of each area was like
* How the people in each area made a living
* Similarities and differences among the three areas
Question
Animals were being slaughtered every night. Hardly had dusk fallen than the muffled bleats of sheep, the death squeals of pigs and the lowing of calves could be heard . . . ‘Slaughter, they’ll take it for meat anyway. . . .’ ” The passage above describes the reaction of the kulaks to what event? A A mandatory tax increase
B Requisition of farm animals to feed Russian soldiers
C The killing of livestock which belonged to the state
D Being forced onto collective farms
Question
The decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s included the cases of Brown vs. Board of Education, Miranda vs. Arizona, and Gideon vs. Wainwright. Most Americans viewed the court’s decisions and opinions as: A Re-establishing the conservative majority opinion in American society
B Activist, seeking to end the social injustice and discriminatory customs
C Maintaining the status quo
D An extension of the Republican Party’s platforms and goals
Question
In February, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Gen. John DeWitt said, “The continued pressure of a large unassimilated, tightly knit racial group, bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of culture, custom and religion, constituted a menace which had to be dealt with.” The response of the federal government was: A To ignore the described problem
B To detain German, Italian, and Japanese nationals
C To organize mass deportation of German-American citizens
D To intern the Japanese-Americans during World War II
Question
Which of the following revolutionary leaders was NOT associated with a reformist movement in Mexico? A Gen. Lazaro Cardenas
B Gen. Porfirio Diaz
C Benito Juarez
D Francisco Madero
Question
Literary works have often aroused the conscience of the nation. Explain the theme and impact of ONE of the following works: * Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”
* Jacob Riis’ “How the Other Half Lives”
* Frank Norris’ “The Octopus”
* John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”
SOURCE: California Department of Education
