A Preview of the New Washington State Assessment System

     The State of Washington is embarked on the development of a comprehensive school change effort which has as its primary goal the improvement of teaching and learning. To that end, the Commission on Student Learning has been charged with three important tasks:

     (1) to establish Essential Learnings that describe what all students should know and be able to do in eight content areas -- reading, writing, communications, mathematics, science, health/fitness, social studies, and the arts;
     (2) to develop an assessment system to measure student progress toward achieving the Essential Learnings; and
     (3) to recommend an accountability system that will recognize and reward successful schools and provide support and assistance to less successful schools.

     The Commission is well on its way to achieving its first major task. Essential Learnings have been adopted in reading, writing, communications, and mathematics. The Essential Learnings for the remaining areas have been developed and are currently undergoing public review and revision, with Commission plans to consider adoption later this spring.

     The Commission's second major task is to develop an assessment system that will systematically gather information from a variety of sources to determine the extent to which students are achieving the knowledge, skills, and understanding prescribed in the Essential Learnings. Development of the assessments is underway in reading, writing, communications and math. Development of the assessments for the remaining content areas will begin after their Essential Learnings have been adopted and sufficient appropriations are provided by the Legislature.

     The assessment system will have four major components: state-level assessments; classroom-based assessments; school and system context indicators; and professional staff development.

State Level Assessments

     The state-level assessments will require students to both select and create answers to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and understanding in each of the Essential Learnings -- from multiple choice and short answer questions to more extended responses, essays, and problem solving tasks. These assessments will be "on demand" insofar as students will all respond to the same tasks, under the same conditions, at the same time during the school year.

     The developmental schedule for the reading, writing, communications and math assessments began with a pilot of the assessments for grade 4 in spring of 1996 and with operational assessments at grade 4 beginning in the spring of 1997. Grade 7 piloting will occur in the spring of 1997 with operational forms available beginning in the spring of 1998. Grade 10 development will begin with a limited pilot in spring of 1997, a more extensive pilot in the spring of 1998, with operational forms available in the spring of 1999. All students, teachers, and schools at each grade level will be encouraged to participate in the pilot as well as the operational assessments.

     The "window" for this spring's grade 4 pilot is April 22 to May 10 and more than 240 school districts and over 50,000 students have agreed to participate in the pilot. The reading, writing, and communications assessment will require three days (3-1/2 to 4 hours) and the math assessment will require two days (2-1/2 to 3 hours). Schools may choose to try out either one or both of the assessments. Because this is a pilot test of the items and tasks being developed, no student or school level scores will be reported.

     However, teachers will be asked to provide comments and information about the assessment tasks, the directions for students and teachers, and the general procedures to improve the operational forms of the assessments. Teachers will also be encouraged to involve as many students as possible in the assessments, including special needs students with handicapping conditions, students who are learning English as a second language, students who are in learning support programs such as Title 1 or Learning Assistance (LAP), and gifted and talented students.

     Because the reporting of results for the operational assessments will be "criterion-referenced" rather than "norm-referenced", a variety of accommodations can be provided to allow nearly all students access to some or all parts of the assessment.

     Classroom teachers and curriculum specialists from across Washington were selected to direct the development of the tasks for grade 4 assessments. Two content committees were created -- one for reading/writing/communications and one for math. Over several months beginning last September, these committees have been meeting with content and assessment specialists from the Riverside Publishing Company (the Commission's primary assessment development contractor) to define the test and item specifications, review the prototype tasks as developed, and review and approve the final tasks to be piloted this spring.

     In addition to the content review committees, a fairness or bias review committee was also established to assure that no items contain words or content that would be offensive to students or parents, or would put some students at a disadvantage in responding to the items for reasons unrelated to the skill or concept being assessed.

     Eight forms of each content area will be piloted this spring which will result in a "pool" of items and tasks. This will allow the creation of new forms of the assessment each year by sampling from the pool, while equating procedures will still allow longitudinal comparisons across years even though different items are used. The pool will also provide the opportunity to vary the kinds of items and tasks so that a particular format (e.g., multiple choice, short answer, or extended response) will not always be associated with the same Essential Learning.

     The state level assessments will be developed, piloted, and implemented at grades 4, 7, and 10 and will include a mix of multiple choice, short answer, and extended items. However, the major part of a student's performance on each assessment will be determined from the open-ended questions, not the multiple choice. Even with some of the multiple choice items, students will be asked to explain their answer choices and describe their problem solving steps. In the grade 4 pilot this spring, students will write to two different prompts. One writing prompt will mirror the "writing process" by having students engage in prewriting activities, brainstorming ideas, producing a rough draft, and after reflecting over- night, revising, editing and producing a final draft.

     After the pilot this spring, the content committees and the fairness committee will again review all of the items used in the pilot testing to determine the final set of items for the pool. Following these reviews, the first operational form will be created from the pool for use at grade 4 in the spring of 1997. Next, a standard-setting committee will be convened to determine the level of performance on the assessment tasks that will be required for students to "meet the standard" on the Essential Learnings.

     It is anticipated that two or three levels of performance leading up to the standard will also be established. These "progress points" will allow students who are well below the standard to show growth over time as well as give students and parents an indication of how far from the standard a student's performance is. Scores on the operational forms of the assessment will be reported in terms of the percentages of students meeting the standard and performing at each of the progress points along the scale.

     Next fall a parallel form of the operational assessments will be created for teachers and students to use as a "practice test". It will be a complete version of the operational forms and will include the scoring criteria for all items, descriptions and examples of students' work that meet the standard, and definitions and examples of student work for each of the progress points leading to the standard. This complete practice test package will be made available next fall for use throughout the school year.

Classroom-Based Assessment

     There are a number of important reasons for including classroom-based assessment as part of the new assessment system. First, it will help students and their teachers better understand the meanings of the Essential Learnings and to recognize the characteristics of quality work that define the standards for each content area. Second, the classroom-based assessment will allow teachers to gather examples of student work throughout the school year, on a schedule consistent with their instruction and local curriculum. Third, it will offer teachers and students opportunities to gather evidence of student achievement in ways that best fit the needs and interests of individual students. Fourth, it will help teachers become more effective in gathering evidence of student learning related to the Essential Learnings. And finally, good classroom-based assessments can be more sensitive to the developmental needs of students and provide the flexibility necessary to better accommodate the learning styles of children with special needs.

     In addition to the kinds of tasks that may be on the state-level assessments, classroom-based assessments can also provide information from oral interviews and presentations, work products, experiments and projects, or exhibitions of student work collected over a week, a month or the entire school year. Teachers will need models for paper and pencil tasks, generic checklists of skills and traits, observation assessment strategies, simple rating scales, and generic protocols for oral communications and personal interviews. At the upper grades, classroom-based assessment strategies can also include models for developing and evaluating extended multi-disciplinary performance-based tasks. Teachers at all levels will need guidelines and models for developing effective, high quality "tests" that reflect student progress toward the Essential Learnings and the instructional programs offered to students.

Context Indicators System

     Information from a context indicators system will help users to understand and interpret student performance in relation to the environment in which teaching and learning occur. Examples of useful indicators might include information about faculty experience and training, instructional strategies employed, special programs offered to students, condition of facilities and equipment, availability of instructional materials and technology, relevant characteristics of students and the community, school attendance, grade to grade transition successes, and high school dropout and graduation rates. The purpose of context information is not to explain away or excuse low performance. Rather, context indicators can provide important information about the conditions that produce consistent success and offer useful information to help schools improve students' achievement of the Essential Learnings.

Professional Development

     The fourth major component of the new assessment system emphasizes the need for ongoing, comprehensive support for teachers and administrators to acquire or improve understanding of the Essential Learnings and the characteristics of sound assessments and instructional strategies that will help students to achieve them. As a first step the Commission has established 16 professional development centers across the state. Most will be managed through the nine Educational Service Districts although three are located in consortia of school districts and one will be operated by staff in the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

     The early focus of these centers will be on developing among teachers and other professional staff, sound assessment literacy and understanding of the Essential Learnings. To be useful in improving teaching and learning, the new assessment system must help teachers to (1) link their teaching to high academic standards based on the Essential Learnings, (2) learn and apply the principles of good assessment practice in their classrooms, (3) use a variety of assessment techniques, (4) judge student work by applying explicit scoring criteria, (5) make instructional decisions based on reliable and valid assessment information, and (6) help students and parents know the Essential Learnings and how students can achieve them. The professional development component of the new state assessment system includes a five-year plan that will address each of these staff development needs by making training experiences and materials available to every school district through the professional development centers.

Summary

     The Commission on Student Learning is committed to developing an instructionally relevant, standards-based assessment system that will enhance instruction and student learning. The new assessments will be based directly on the Essential Learnings. Therefore, teachers and those who provide pre-service and in-service training to teachers should be thoroughly familiar with the content of the Essential Learnings. Teachers at all grade levels need to begin thinking and talking with each other about what they must do in their classrooms to prepare students to achieve the Essential Learnings and to demonstrate their achievement on the classroom-based and state-level assessments.