February 2006 — Features

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Assessment Testing >> In Their Hands

by Jacob Milner

OTHER OPTIONS

What else is out there to help your school assess student learning?
Handheld formative assessments aren’t the only types of formative assessments on the market today. Other modern assessment tools come in two additional varieties:
Web-based and software-based.
Web-based tools, known by some as Application Service Providers, are online versions of traditional paper-based tests. Vendors offering this approach include: Tungsten Learning (www.tungstenlearning.com), SchoolNet (www.schoolnet.com), Scantron (www.scantron.com), Renaissance Learning (www.renlearn.com), Pearson School Systems (www.pearsonschoolsystems.com), Pearson NCS (www.pearsonncs.com), Harcourt Assessment (www.harcourtassessment.com), Princeton Review (www.review.com), and Edusoft (www.edusoft.com).
Software-based tools come as programs to be uploaded to a server or to individual computers in a networked classroom. They include products such as Focus on Standards from ETS (www.ets.org) and state-specific applications from CTB/McGraw-Hill (www.ctb.com).
With both of these options, teachers set up assessment tests on computers in a lab or at the back of a classroom, and students take the tests at set times, usually hours designated for assessment. In some cases, teachers can tinker with program protocols to establish rules by which different students receive different sets of questions to assess certain skills.
With the right presets, for instance, special needs students in a particular class can receive questions that quiz concepts at a more basic level. Conversely, a system can be programmed to send only the toughest questions to gifted students.
Edmundo Gonzalez, vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Product Management at Software Technology (www.sti-k12.com) in Mobile, AL, says this is precisely what makes formative assessment so worthwhile. Gonzalez, whose company sells Web-based assessment tools, says that in his business, as is the case in the world of handheld assessments, the ability to make the same assessment different for every child in a class is by far the technology’s biggest benefit.
“The beauty of formative assessments and the technology behind them is that they are entirely customizable depending on a student’s previous performance and standing in the class,” he says. “No matter how you look at it, this is the way educational testing was made to be.”

A Different Approach

Products from Texas-centric Tango Software have yielded similarly encouraging results for the Rio Grande City Certified Independent School District (TX). There, Technology and Instruction Director Vilma Garza says the district has used Tango products since 2002 to facilitate huge jumps in reading ability. During that time, Garza says the district went from having 33 percent of third-graders pass the TPRI reading exam, to a 90 percent pass rate. Rio Grande City CISD teachers have embraced the technology so completely that Garza notes that the tools have changed the fabric of evaluations themselves, making tests something students actually look forward to.

“What once took weeks of manual tabulation [is] now available to us as soon as teachers tap ‘finish’ on the handhelds,” she explains. “Our students love being able to use technology to take their assessment. Can you imagine students being excited about testing?”

Liberty Source, the firm that makes Tango, offers two distinct solutions: Tango RX and Tango Suite. Both of these solutions can be preloaded with benchmarks to assess student compliance with TPRI and Tejas LEE, to name two. The big difference between Tango’s tools and Wireless Generation’s offerings is ap-proach: While Wireless Generation focuses on improving the process of giving fixed, proven assessments and helping teachers and administrators to understand and use the data, Tango emphasizes flexibility by enabling teachers to load any other assessment whatsoever. Edward Barerra, Liberty’s president, says that neither of the Tango solutions differentiates between formative and summative assessment because the company wants to enable teachers to collect any kind of information they want.

This open-ended approach enables teachers to personalize the assessment experience in any way they see fit. Many of them, including Garza at the Rio Grande City CISD, author items for their day-to-day instruction, reword questions, or upload entirely different types of assessments—even summative ones, if they so desire. According to Barrera, the idea behind all of this is to maximize flexibility. Barrera says that by providing educators with these kinds of options within a set of basic parameters, Tango improves upon the likelihood that teachers actually will do something with assessment data once they administer the tests.

“Assessment technology needs to align with a teacher’s personal style of instruction,” he says. “In some instances, that’s not the case, and we need to make sure we help them incorporate our products into the way each and every educator runs [his or her] classroom.”

Down the Road

While both of these formative assessment models work well, experts say that K-12 school districts must overcome some critical challenges surrounding the technology before it enters the mainstream. First, of course, is teaching teachers how to use it. In many districts, teachers are just getting accustomed to having desktop computers in the classrooms, and teaching them how to administer assessments on handheld devices is an entirely different ballgame. In Rio Grande, teachers are required to take workshops on the new technology; at Orange County PSD, the training is ongoing, as 25 teachers run refresher courses in the technology throughout the year.

Rio Grande City teachers have embraced the technology so completely that the tools have changed teh fabric of evaluations themselves, making tests something students actually look forward.

Once teachers learn how to use the handheld technology, perhaps the biggest challenge is getting the educators to actually incorporate it into their curriculum. Stiggins, the CEO at Assessment Training Institute in Portland, says the issue here is contextual communication—finding formative assessment systems that communicate data in context so that teachers know how to use it. Stiggins says the key to ensuring this critical step is a worthwhile reporting system that involves both teachers and students in a continuous process.

“If a formative assessment system generates information about student achievement, it needs to include within the system effective ways to communicate results,” he says. “The best technology and most accurate assessments in the world are wasted if the results aren’t communicated in a way that can be used to improve learning as a whole.”

Wireless Generation’s Berger calls this the “Now What?” syndrome, explaining that once teachers have identified what formative assessment is, and why it’s important, they must learn how to contextualize the data it provides. Berger lauds the use of established and validated assessments that enable educators to make “apples to apples” comparisons of data over time, and says that with these tools teachers can visualize student progress, customize instruction, and help group students according to needs. He adds that his firm currently is working with publishers of instructional programs to integrate its mCLASS assessments products with other curriculum and intervention offerings.

Hupert, the researcher at the Education Development Center, likes this strategy, going so far as to say that no assessment is worthwhile without a valid plan. Educators who prefer a heavy phonics approach to literacy may choose an assessment that emphasizes knowledge of basic phonics in early reading; those educators who prefer to focus on comprehension skills may choose an assessment that includes more emphasis on students reading from texts. Hupert says the bottom line is that a district’s formative assessments shouldn’t be plucked out of a pile and plugged into a program, but rather selected and administered carefully to meet specific achievement goals throughout the year.

“No matter which technology you choose—handhelds, desktops, laptops, whatever—all assessments should reflect student need,” she says. “We need to rethink the way we utilize testing across the educational system, understand that different students require different kinds of teaching, and come to accept that formative assessment is the only way to make the learning process reflect how students really learn.”

Jacob Milner, a regular contributor to this publication, wrote “Warming Up to Wireless” in our November 2005 issue. He is a writer and editor based in northern California.

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Jacob Milner, "Assessment Testing >> In Their Hands," T.H.E. Journal, 2/1/2006, http://www.thejournal.com/articles/17865

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