Test questions posed for Fayette high schools
By Yuri-Grace Ohashi
News co-Editor, The Prowler
[Editor’s note: This edited article originally appeared in longer form in the Starr’s Mill High School newspaper and is reprinted with permission.]
While 180 days may seem like an eternity to a high school student, it is equivalent to less than half a year. Between syllabus days, pep rallies, school assemblies and field trips, how much time are students actively receiving instruction in the classroom? Are mandated assessments the most effective means of testing? Where do schools draw the line and say “enough is enough?”
Fayette’s five high schools run on either six or seven period schedules in which students are required to be tested in each of their classes. Students who are taking Student Progress Measures (SPM) courses are required to take both a pre- and post-test, and these mandated tests cannot be exempted. The same holds for Milestone tests, which are administered at the end of each semester. “We’ve had some changes in the number [of mandatory tests], which, I believe, have benefited students and teachers by reducing the amount of tests that they must take,” Dr. Terry Oatts, Fayette’s Assistant Superintendent of Student Achievement, said.
While strides may have been taken to limit the amount of time students spend testing, there is no denying that it takes up a significant portion of school days. “My hope is that we can somewhat reduce the number of assessments because I know that I’ve heard from teachers and from students and from educators all across the state that we’re spending a lot of time testing, and it’s cutting into our instructional time,” Superintendent Dr. Joseph Barrow said.
Each of the Fayette County high schools implements its own exam exemption policy based on academics or attendance, allowing students to opt out of taking regular semester exams with the exception of Milestone and AP tests.
Regardless of whether or not a student chooses to take an exam, entire school days and sporadic class periods are dedicated to testing and ultimately take away from time that would otherwise be spent in the classroom.
“I think we’ve already reduced the amount of testing that is done, and the state has allowed us to do that,” Barrow said. “People are trying to figure out what the student knows on a cost effective and fairly consistent basis, and while the testing format that we use, in my opinion, is not the best, it can get to the masses and get some indication.”
The Milestone tests are equivalent to semester exams in that they count towards 20 percent of a student’s final semester grade, unlike the SPM post-test that counts for two percent or less of a student’s grade. The discrepancies in grade weighting and equivalencies among the various cumulative and diagnostic tests contribute to the excessive testing tendencies of Fayette’s current system.
All courses, except for the eight Milestone subjects, have exams at the end of the semester, even if they have a respective SPM assessment in place. This doubling up on testing adds to the heap of scantrons and test booklets that students dedicate time to, not to mention the impact it has on teachers. As a result, they must reconfigure lesson plans, unit outlooks and classroom assignments to incorporate testing into their whittled-down 180 days in class.
Testing for the semester exams alone cover a span of eight days, and each Milestone takes up at least half a school day, requiring teachers to relocate rooms and work around interrupted bell schedules. On top of the chaotic scramble to move lesson materials to a different hall or the pain of cramming these lessons into a shorter timeframe, a significant portion of students may miss any given class depending on their grade level and the Milestone subject that is being tested that day.
“I actually think that if assessment or testing is not meaningful or purposeful and intentional, then one could argue that it is encroaching upon instructional time,” Dr. Oatts said. “But the reality is that assessment done right does not have a dichotomous relationship with instructional time but is on a continuum. It’s assessment as instruction.”
In addition to Milestones and semester exams, students and teachers alike must spend class time on SPM assessments, which require one or two class periods to complete for both the pre- and post-tests. Students who take AP courses must miss additional class time over a span of two weeks during early to mid May, just around the time that high school classes are submitting last-minute assignments and finalizing grades.
“There is a subtle term called assessment of learning and assessment for learning,” Barrow said. “Our formal structures now are assessment FOR learning, and what I’d really like us to focus on are the assessments OF learning.” The current diagnostic measures, like most standardized tests, are rather one-size-fits-all in the sense that every student taking them receives the same questions, and progress is based upon accuracy.
“I would really like to look at assessment over testing,” Barrow said. “The assessment of learning can be done relatively easily as a ticket out the door, as a real short method, or as a socratic seminar discussion. It should be more diagnostic and informative so that we can find the gaps and help fill them.”
So how exactly is student growth measured or quantified? “When we talk about student growth at the state level, students are compared to others who have performed similarly on other high stakes tests,” Oatts said. This grouping creates a more even playing field that systematically factors out for variations in student learning and knowledge. “I think that’s real important because you want to compare students who have a similar history,” he said.
Even with differences in student achievement taken into account, the truth lies in Oatts’ admittance that “no accountability framework is perfect.” He goes on to explain that the system currently implemented in Fayette County, while a work in progress, is an “earnest attempt to build and have a better structure than what we had with No Child Left Behind, which only looked at English/Language Arts and Mathematics.”
Behind the SPMs, however, is a perplexing grey area that involves the grading and means of measuring student progress and growth. Merely taking the difference from a student’s final score and his or her original pre-test score, in actuality, reveals very little about this student’s true capacity for potential and retention of relevant knowledge. If he or she scores well above peers on the pretest, there is very little room for improvement on the final. The converse is true in that a student who has very low accuracy on the pretest has a greater possibility for expressing percentage growth.
Eight courses, two from each core subject area, have set “Georgia Milestones” that are required for all Georgia high school students: Coordinate Algebra, Analytic Geometry, United States History, Economics/Business/Free Enterprise, Biology, Physical Science, Ninth Grade Literature and Composition, and American Literature and Composition.
A new law reworked the main function of the SPM, incorporating it into the teacher evaluation process and reducing the number of required classroom observations that principals and assistant principals had to conduct. The diagnostic testing process has now been refocused on the local level, giving greater power to each district in determining what is tested and how.
The quality and purpose of the tests implemented in Fayette County seems to overshadow both the quantity of tests administered and the quantity of days they span across. While students may be spending a significant amount of time with a pencil and scantron, the purpose behind testing through SPMs, Milestones, and other standardized tests is what the county focuses on with student growth and classroom instruction.
“I think that assessment is very important, and for me, it’s not been about assessment per say but the balance,” Oatts said. “Historically it has been an imbalance towards high stakes testing. I’m not anti-high stakes tests but the ratio should be more towards formative rather than high stakes or state-administered tests.”
[This story originally appeared in the Starr’s Mill High School newspaper “The Prowler.” Reprinted with permission from the author, staff writer Yuri-Grace Ohashi, and Justin Spencer, faculty advisor for the student newspaper. The full article is online at www.theprowlernews.org/features/2016/12/01/putting-assessments-to-the-test/.]
