Illinois joins the procession

The Chicago Tribune on Halloween 2013 reported “Illinois grade school test scores plunge — especially in poor communities”.  Following on the heels of New York’s testing debacle, in which performance gaps widened as well, we’re beginning to detect a pattern.  

The Illinois State Board of Education, on its student assessment page, reports that it had to “adjust the performance levels on the ISAT for Reading and Mathematics to better align with the more rigorous standards of the Common Core”, and a separate document entitled “2013 ISAT Mathematics Assessment”, dated December 5, 2012, and authored by “Rachel Jachino, ISBE Mathematics Principal Consultant”, states that “[a]pproximately twenty percent (20%) of the operational items on the Reading and Mathematics ISATs were written to Common Core Standards and will be included as part of students’ scores/results for the 2013 ISAT,” but it remains unclear what portion of the drop in 2013 scores is attributed to when the “state increased the scores required to pass ISAT math and reading tests by 13 to 30 points, depending on the test and grade” (Tribune), or to an actual change of test content.

Is any improvement in store for this year?  Cut scores are not set by teachers, but we’re well into the 2013-2014 school year, and the 2014 ISAT Mathematics “Roadmap” (pdf), intended to guide teachers in their instruction, has yet to be released.

The ISBE recently removed sample questions for the 2013 tests on the premise that the “sample items displayed were not necessarily representative of the material that will appear on the 2014 ISAT”, which, incidentally, will be a one-year deal, because Illinois will “replace the ISAT with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessments during the 2014-2015 school year.”

It’s a foggy road ahead indeed for Illinois teachers and their students.

Fractions are numbers, too – Part 3

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (``The Nation’s Report Card’’) in 2007 posed the following question:

Sidestepping for now the issue that only half of eighth graders correctly solved an elementary school problem, calculator allowed, the intrigue lies in the distribution of wrong answers:

A stroll through the PARCC

While Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium has already administered a pilot exam with more than one million participating students, the other state consortium, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, seems well behind in what is becoming a consortia war, and has already had at least one state jump ship.

To further add to our sense that PARCC is in disarray, information releases coming out of PARCC are few and far between and have this year decreased in frequency.  Nevertheless, with little fanfare, PARCC on August 19 released for public review a new series of item prototypes.  Two companies, ETS and Pearson, have contracted with PARCC “to develop the items and tasks for the PARCC mid-year, performance-based and end-of-year assessments”, but PARCC does not make clear the source of its latest batch of questions.