In Service

Students and teachers in New York State spend a good portion of their school year sharpening their skills and knowledge in preparation for the English Language Arts Assessements in grades 3-8 and the Regents Examination, offered in grade 11. Ironically, if you were to ask many teachers to predict what was going to be on the test that they are “teaching to”, many of them would tell you that they were uncertain. After all, it is impossible to predict what is going to be on the test from year to year. What we are certain of, however, is that it is going to be hard. And people are going to feel pressured by its mere existence for a bazillion different reasons.

As a classroom teacher, I was not a fan of NYS Assessments. Not at all. First of all, a large portion of them involved multiple choice questions, and if you read my last entry, you already know how I felt about that. Also? In my mind, “teaching to the ELA Assessment” meant familiarizing my students with the construct of the test and allowing that construct to heavily influence the construct of my own classroom assessments. What did this mean to me? It meant tossing out five of the ten performance-based assessments that my students found engaging and replacing them with assessments that looked a lot like the NYS Assessment. This is what we call a knee-jerk reaction, and I, like many of my teacher-friends, spent most of the 1990’s embracing it as a powerful instructional tool.

Here’s the thing: State Assessments can be evil. They can be used in a variety of ways that range from meaningless to destructive, and the fact of the matter is this: that will happen when people aren’t informed about how to use them well. For better or for worse, though, they aren’t going away. Once I wrapped my head around that notion, I began to develop a deep interest in how standardized tests, such as the NYS ELA Assessment, might be used in meaningful ways by TEACHERS and STUDENTS.

What if, instead of simply teaching TO a test, we started teaching FROM it?

For example: the NYS ELA Assessments are given once a year. They are a standardized measure of how students perform during one quick moment in time each year. Drawing conclusions off of that score alone is a good place to begin a conversation, but in my mind, the NYS Assessments provide mere clues for teachers about where instruction might be improved. And this happens only when teachers are invited to delve into the test and into the data generated from it. Together. Collaboratively.

In order to understand what the NYS ELA test demands of students, teachers gain a lot when they are given the opportunity to take the test and collect information about the content of the test, the construct of the test, and all of the skills required to perform successfully on it. During my first year as a consultant, Marie Perini, a colleague of mine, suggested that I engage teachers in perception mapping, a process used frequently at that time by Jennifer Borgioli, who now works with Giselle Martin-Kniep at Learner Centered Initiatives. Although I was unfamiliar with Jenn’s process, I did some research, got the hand of it, and encouraged teachers to use it in several districts soon after. In the end? Gathering perception data revealed so much to the teachers that I worked with that I now hesitate to roll out data before working through this process.

Once we are clear about our perceptions regarding test performance, digging into the data becomes very interesting. In many cases, we learn how incorrect our perceptions are….mine included! And suddenly, teachers begin to realize how necessary data is…..and not just standardized test data. Classroom data.

Case in point: if I roll out trend data revealing that students at a particular grade level  have struggled with items testing knowledge of the story elements for the last ten years, it would make sense for teachers to collaborate about the potential causes for that. In our region, this process is faciliated through the English Language Arts Deep Curriculum Alignment Project. Teachers involved in this project work together to identify Power Performance Indicators and deconstruct test items aligned to them. What we’ve learned is that while assessment data might suggest a historical weakness in test items relevant to “story elements”, when the items themselves are revisited, there were many other skills embedded within them. Students could be struggling with any of those skills. How do we uncover what the real problem is?

We teach FROM the test. We use the test to provide us with information about where we may need to improve. We revisit the items. We determine which literacy and thinking skills were finer parts of the item as a whole. And then? We align our instruction and a number of our assessments to those discoveries. We gather THAT data. Because THAT data will give us a clearer idea about how our students are struggling and what kinds of instruction are leading to improvement.

Classroom data provides teachers with evidence about what works, instructionally, and what might not. It can guide effective decision-making. It brings an end to department battles, based on hunches, over which instructional strategies are “best.” It can lead to more efficient teaching and easier learning. It simplifies our struggle.

It also makes meaningful use of those assessments we hate so much.

Angela Stockman