A testing template in Texas
By Dale Chu Last week, the Texas Education Agency advanced the conversation on fall testing by making optional end-of-year assessments (EOY) available to parents and educators free of charge. Covering most of the same grades and subject areas as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), these EOY assessments are being provided as […]
Can we land the COVID-19 assessment plane?
By Dale Chu The Center for Assessment just published a curious piece suggesting that the current conversation regarding how to measure the covid slide come this fall is a fool’s errand. The author opens by creating a straw man in the form of a composite question from school and district officials: What assessment do you […]
A consensus on diagnostic testing
By Dale Chu The Collaborative for Student Success recently released the results from a national survey of over 5,500 education professionals, which gauged their perspectives on what schools must do this fall to help students “catch up” from the unprecedented disruption in learning engendered by school closures due to the coronavirus. Notably, the poll showed […]
Why not a race to the top for diagnostic testing?
By Dale Chu With spring testing canceled, the need for some form of high-quality diagnostic testing this fall seems to be gaining steam. For the moment, states and districts are still largely focused on basic needs and technology, but I expect the conversation around diagnostics to pick up as we near the end of the […]
New science assessments in Massachusetts
By Dale Chu Just because spring testing is on hold doesn’t mean innovation in assessment has come to a halt. Last week, Massachusetts got the green light from the U.S. Department of Education to develop new science assessments for grades 5 and 8 under ESSA as part of the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority or IADA […]
The sound and fury of testing reduction
By Dale Chu The convergence of the suspension of spring testing with a bipartisan backlash to standardized tests has raised questions as to what the future holds for annual state assessments. Into the breach stepped FutureEd earlier this week with a timely analysis titled, “The Big Test: The Future of State Standardized Assessments.” The report, […]
Owning the next steps on testing
By Dale Chu For all the talk about federal testing waivers and the anticipated COVID-19 learning loss, there’s been far less discussion on what happens next to help students hit the ground running in the fall. As if the stakes weren’t already high enough, NWEA released a study last week that raised the panic level […]
Assessments by the numbers
By Dale Chu With all of the coronavirus related news vis-à-vis testing, I’ve neglected to mention the exciting updates we’ve made to Assessment HQ’s Explore State Data tool. Here are some of the notable ones, which reflect state data released at the end of last year: – 33 states have comparable data from 2016 through 2019. […]
The testing terminator
By Dale Chu All 50 states including the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Bureau of Indian Education have sought or received an initial waiver from the U.S. Department of Education to suspend spring testing. Given the extensive disruption in learning, pressing the pause button now makes sense. It’s hard to overstate the implications […]
What will the cancellation of spring testing mean?
By Dale Chu Over the last week, we’ve been monitoring state movement on spring testing with our COVID-19 end-of-year assessment tracker. Given the trend, it’s become clear that by the end of the week all states are going to have a testing waiver and will not be testing this spring. With that in mind, we’re […]