educational news

These 4 assessment trends should remain top-of-mind

Few issues in K-12 education have been as contentious, particularly since the implementation of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, as standardized testing.

Criticism over the years has focused largely on the impacts of attaching high-stakes to assessment results, because of their connection to teacher and school evaluations. The fear is that this creates an environment that “teaches to the test” at the expense of arguably every subject that isn’t math or reading. In return, that approach risks stifling educators’ abilities to provide students a well-rounded education across all subject areas, as well as their flexibility to innovate with different classroom approaches for fear that testing results not reflect improvement.

1. Opt-out movements

Parent opposition to standardized testing bred significant opt-out movements in several states. Those movements hit a peak in 2016, with particularly active movements in New York and Colorado risking federal sanctions for those states if they didn’t meet a 95% testing threshold.

The movements themselves were found in a Columbia University Teachers College study to be comprised predominantly of activists who were highly educated, wealthy, white, married and politically liberal. But the movement also included homeschooling parents, childless adults in support of the cause, and parents who hadn’t opted out their kids.

And they also expressed opposition to a variety of other educational issues across the political spectrum, including test-based teacher evaluations, a narrowing of curriculum because of test prep, the corporatization and privatization of education, and the Common Core State Standards.

Still, with standardized testing having risen to become the primary accountability tool for schools under the previous No Child Left Behind law, critics argued that it ultimately forced schools and districts to pay attention to groups of students who they had previously allowed to fall through the cracks.

2. Issues with digital

With the increasing presence of tech in classrooms, annual standardized exams have also gone digital. This has led to notable issues in several states over the last few years, with glitches preventing students from effectively completing exams on time. 

In many cases, this has been chalked up to network infrastructure that couldn’t handle the demand of so many students signing on for exams simultaneously. The FCC’s E-rate program can assist schools in upgrading their networks to handle that load, but more planning before rolling out a new initiative is also important, as these issues can be avoided ahead of time if mandates don’t force schools and districts to adopt new testing formats before they’re prepared to do so successfully.

Beyond network issues, navigational limitations have also hindered student performance. A May study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science showed lower scores on digital exams when elementary and middle school students took digital exams that didn’t allow them to revisit previous questions. These design issues are counterintuitive to effective testing strategies utilized on paper-and-pencil formats where students can answer what they know first before revisiting items they were uncertain about.