Improving Standardized Test Score Reporting and Administration for Students, Caregivers, and Educators
Currently, standardized testing is a necessary but often time-consuming process that is used to measure educational progress to improve educational outcomes and curricula; however, the immediate consumers of standardized tests are educators, students, and their caregivers who do not typically receive detailed information in exchange for the time spent studying for and taking these exams. This brief proposes reforming standardized test score reporting to improve achievement level labeling using more strengths-based language as well as to provide actionable feedback and personalized resources. This brief also proposes actionable steps to achieve this by one, increasing the number of test administrations to increase progress monitoring and adjustment opportunities before the end of the school year and two, provide educators with detailed information in the form of dashboards and ready resources
Introduction
Standardized tests are ubiquitous in K-12 education in the United States. In fact, the average student spends 20-25 hours or more during the school year just taking standardized tests. In addition, the scores from these tests have high consequences for students and their educators, including promotion to the next grade or measurement of teacher quality. However, the data shows that test scores have largely stagnated since the 2002 passage of No Child Left Behind, which introduced the nationwide requirement to implement high-stakes testing.
Due to the high stakes nature of these assessments, many educators feel that they have to adjust their curriculum and instruction to best suit material they believe will be on the test. This is sometimes to the detriment of teaching other skills or performing activities that might be more cognitively challenging or engaging. There is also limited information about the specifics of what is on the test, due to the proprietary nature of the questions and tasks on these exams. Many educators do not feel confident that they have thoroughly taught all of the material on the accountability exam. Finally, parents and guardians also have difficulty understanding score reports. Regrettably, test results are often delivered between school years, after any potential tutoring or support could be delivered.
To address these challenges, we need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families. This is especially important at a time when more universities are becoming test-optional and more families are choosing to opt their K-12 students out of summative standardized testing. Additionally, this poses a potential existential threat to testing publishers and also necessitates that the system adjust to the needs of the public.
Improving Standardized Testing Score Reporting For Students and Guardians
The core group most impacted by standardized score reporting are students and their caregivers. Most families receive score reports that provide very high-level information about students’ performance, such as their overall test score relative to other students in their state and district. Some score reports provide slightly more information, but they are typically not specific to the individual student’s strengths and areas for growth. Nor do they provide actionable feedback or resources for how the student can improve low scoring sections or extend learning for areas of strength. Additionally, these reports do not include accompanying information, so it is very difficult for a parent/guardian to extrapolate from the score report specific areas to support or extend their child’s learning.
Standardized test reports have a damaging effect on students’ academic identity and self-esteem. Many of these score reports use labels to describe achievement levels and more care should be embedded in this language. Results are sometimes described with labels like “below proficient,” which have been found to be damaging to students’ self-perception of their academic performance and ability to improve. Even slight changes to labels like the inclusion of the word ‘yet’ in “not yet meeting expectations” were found to be more encouraging than deficit-based labeling. Finally, many of these reports are not designed to be accessible for a wide range of disabilities or non-English languages, nor do they explain where the scores originated or how to apply them, which limits the number of students and caregivers who can access these reports or use their information to improve educational outcomes.
The solution for students is to redesign the score reports so that they are more actionable and positively framed in their achievement labels. Scoring should especially highlight what the student does well and frame the areas where the student needs support using growth mindset-facing language rather than deficit-based language. Additionally, these reports should provide resources and recommendations to remediate areas that still need improvement and to extend learning for learning domains that the student has already mastered.
Improving Score Reporting and Data Analysis For Educators
The secondary group impacted by standardized testing score reporting are educators. Depending on the state or district, educators typically receive a general summative report about their incoming students’ performance on last school year’s standardized testing as well as a report about their previous students’ performance, especially as it applies to measures of teacher quality. Depending on the state/district, this report tends to have slightly more granular information than the student-facing reports. However, this still does not provide detailed information on the specific skills where each student needs additional support. Moreover, even if the educator receives detailed standards/objectives that each student missed on the previous year’s exam, they do not receive specific information on how to take that report and use it to remediate skills into their current curriculum. There is also frequently no time in the school year to remediate the skills that still need to be learned from the previous year nor planning time for educators to adjust current grade level curricula to allow for robust remediation. Finally, when educators receive these reports over the summer or in the early fall, this is far too late for the educator to adjust their instruction and support their learners during the school year. Ideally, teachers would have interim progress reports during the school year so that they could address and support existing issues while they are still teaching.
To support educators, the score reporting process needs an additional component that helps educators translate score reports into actionable pedagogy that blends with current grade level curricula. This should include diverse programs of support for the different patterns of skills and types of students. Additionally, there should be a mid-year process for collecting and reporting data. This way, educators can support struggling students before the accountability test at the end of the year. This could mean that the testing system shifts such that the more summative assessment is offered at the middle of the school year; or it could mean distributing the average 2-3 day end-of-year assessment days throughout the school year, to not increase the number of days being spent testing.
Areas for Improvement
A three-pronged approach would greatly improve the testing system. The first is to create more in-depth score reports that are more actionable. The second is to create skill-based dashboards that teachers can access to support remediation in real time. Thirdly, the long-term plan for this work would be to distribute accountability testing across the school year so that there are more opportunities for catching students who struggle before the school year is over. Taken together, this approach provides a starting point for improving the testing system for educators, students, and their communities.
More Actionable Score Reporting That Includes Resources
The first, most easily fixed issue is to support an improved score reporting system that is more detailed and actionable for students and their caregivers. Instead of just a scale score and the overall achievement level that the student has attained, a revamped score would include more detailed feedback about the student’s strengths and areas for improvement. For example, these reports could include links or attachments to additional open educational resources recommended by that state/district to help improve those skills. These reports should also include information about what the student does well and provide resources or recommendations for how to extend or further develop those skills as well.
To create enhanced score reports, there needs to be a larger consensus about a score report’s basic guidelines. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing can assist with basic score reports; however, these recommendations do not include any information about using score reporting as a method for supporting student learning or fully capturing student learning. As part of this process, the larger organizational, state, and federal educational regulatory bodies must decide on a set of guidelines for score reporting. As a starting point, groups like State and District-Level Education Associations, as well as the Association of Test Publishers, could develop resources describing best practices.
One potential method for funding these innovative changes to testing would be for the states who were interested in overhauling their system to apply for an Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority Grant; however, this might need adjustment to fund the proposed policy adjustment. Additionally, standardized testing represents a large expenditure for each state. Each state’s Department of Education could decide to use a “Pay for Success” approach in which each state or large district sets outcome measurements for how they would like their testing program to be adjusted to be more usable for students and educators and then only deliver on their procurement decision if these measures are met.
More Checkpoints, Fewer Stakes
More radically, the accountability system needs to shift to one in which huge decisions about student ability and teacher quality are not just down to one test that takes place one time a year that is not directly related to the students’ context or immediate knowledge. There are a variety of different reasons why that test would not reflect the true ability of students; everything from illness or anxiety to certain types of disability that are not compatible with one-time assessment. Instead, smaller, lower-stakes assessments should be offered more frequently throughout the school year so that misconceptions and gaps in knowledge can be addressed more effectively and responsively. One model that was piloted in Louisiana was to offer three smaller exams across the school year that were aligned to the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum instead of reading unrelated, decontextualized passages. This approach is fairer because it removes the impact of students’ background knowledge and is a truer measure of students’ learning from that year’s curriculum. Additionally, many schools have switched to using the Star assessment system, which is a computer-adaptive test that can be administered multiple times throughout the year to support frequent checks on student learning. The Star assessment system also provides more detailed progress monitoring for measuring student learning than one summative assessment.
Alternatively, instead of standardized assessment, Performance-Based Learning is another way to capture what students have learned throughout the whole school year. This model involves project-based assessments that lead to a summative portfolio review that determines graduation/retention criteria instead of reliance on external standardized assessments. This system is lower stakes for students because it gives them the whole school year to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery of the curricular standards. It also provides a lot more agency for students and educators to scaffold and support students in demonstrating their knowledge in much more diverse ways. The largest difficulty with this process would be state and nation-wide consensus on what these systems look like and how to ensure consistency between grade level projects and accountability.
Dashboards for Teachers
In addition to improved score reporting, educators should receive a more detailed set of skills and their current students’ progress in each of these. This report should also be tied in the current curriculum that the teacher is using. This way, the system can recommend lessons and materials to remediate the skills students struggle with as well as to provide extension for areas where students are already proficient. An example of this that was found to work was an increase in math performance in Maine using the ASSISTments platform to tie specific content to targeted student homework practice. Classroom time is precious. Knowing more about the specific lessons that are needed to best support growth and achievement is paramount to improving student learning. The decision about what to include in the dashboard would initially be left to the discretion of the curriculum/test makers; however, this would also likely need to be decided based on best practices as well.
Conclusion
The current state of the field for standardized testing is very unidirectional – students take summative assessments and these scores are used to make judgements about students, teachers, and funding for their schools. Despite spending a large amount of classroom time just taking the exams, not including all of the test preparation that goes into sitting for those exams, there is very little direct benefit to teachers and students from taking these assessments. For example, student scores have not improved nationally on the “Nation’s Report Card” in over a decade, despite increased nationwide testing and accountability. Additionally, testing is experienced as an extremely stressful period that has little positive immediate benefit for students. Making the score reporting system more of a “two way street” in which students, educators, and their families can glean actionable information about how to support student success will make this much more of a useful process that will support student achievement, especially for students with disabilities and students who are approaching grade-level proficiency.
The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) is an example of many of the features discussed above. Many schools and districts within the state of Massachusetts have agreed to use performance tasks throughout the school year as a more robust measure of student learning. MCIEA also has an overview dashboard that measures school quality, not just through academic achievement. The dashboard considers school culture, access to resources, and student and community wellbeing. While MCIEA does not address student-specific feedback, it does provide alternative methods of measuring school quality. It is also an example of dashboards being used to disseminate school quality information to the larger public.
One example of how some of the recommendations above function is evidenced through the work done at ERB. This company is an assessment provider; however, they provide specific reports to the school leadership, the teachers and students, and their families. Each of these reports is tailored to the specific needs of each group and the team also helps facilitate webinars and other resources to help all groups to understand the test scores and how to use these best in improving student learning and outcomes.
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