Reclaiming State Testing’s Formative Roots

In recent posts, I have written that the future of state testing depends on understanding an accepting its limitations. 

Thankfully, we have moved well beyond state testing trying or claiming to be all things for all people.

We understand the difference between state testing and formative assessment.

We realize the foolishness of our well-intentioned belief that we could offset teaching to the test by giving teachers “a test worth teaching to.”  Ah, to be that young, naïve, and idealistic again.

We know that state tests are not going to provide actionable information to classroom teachers to inform the instruction of individual students; and more importantly, we are finally ready to say that out loud.

Plus, most of us acknowledge that it’s a bad idea (and I mean really bad) to attempt to build a state test by cobbling together results from a bunch of tests intended to provide that actionable information to teachers throughout the year.

And it took a while, but I think that we have even reached the point where it’s clear that state test scores are a necessary but not sufficient component of school accountability.

State testing is what it is. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But what is it?

Aided by a host of critics, we have done a great job in describing what state testing isn’t.

If state testing is to serve a useful purpose going forward, however, we need to be much more clear on defining, what it is, its purpose, how it can and should be used.

A key first step in doing that, I believe, is to reclaim state testing’s formative roots.

Recalling Our Formative Roots

Before reclaiming those roots, however, we have to recognize them. We have to remember the past and recall that the roots of state testing were, in fact, formative.

State testing was a component of the ongoing formative evaluation of curriculum and instructional programs – ongoing and evaluation being the operative words here. That evaluation process, in turn, was part of school improvement. School improvement is a complex, continuous process which benefits from solid state tests administered at key checkpoints, or milestones, in a student’s 12-14 year education cycle as part of a formative evaluation process. For years, grades 4, 8, and somewhere between 10 and 12 were identified as those key checkpoints for testing.

Were some summative decisions about students, programs, and even personnel made along the way; of course, but the focus was always forward looking, always on making the adjustments needed to improve what happens next; in other words, always formative.

We have been conditioned over the past several decades, particularly since NCLB, to view state testing as summative; so much so that we’ve even added summative to the name: State Summative Assessment. Go ahead, Google it.

Why and how did we allow that to happen?

Stepping Into Summative

My first instinct is to blame the feds; and they probably should bear at least part of the blame, but less than you might think.

The word “summative” only shows up a handful of times in NCLB and ESSA with regard to assessment and in most of those cases it’s in reference to student testing and the annual determination of student proficiency; but therein, lies a big part of our summative problem. NCLB marked a tipping point in the transition of state testing from being primarily school- or program-centered to being student-centered; and state testing defined as student testing tends to be summative.

Annual testing of students at grades 3 through 8 at the end of the school year on grade-level standards produces individual student results reported in terms of concrete labels denoting attainment of grade-level achievement standards. Those students are Proficient, but you are not. She’s a ‘5’ and he’s a ‘2’.

Then we start again at a new grade level with new standards and a new test in the fall.

All of that certainly has a summative feel to it.

(Note: It’s true that there were high-stakes uses of state tests for individual students prior to NCLB that can only be called summative, but those uses were often based on different tests than those we would now consider as part of the state assessment program, so let’s put a pin in that discussion for today.)

Takeaway #1: State testing has been defined as student testing.

Another major contributor to the summativization of state testing was the rise of formative assessment – also a distinctly student-centered activity. We needed to be able to make a clear distinction between state testing and formative assessment, and nothing feels more distinct from formative than summative. At least at first glance, formative and summative are polar opposites.

State testing was not formative assessment; so therefore, it was summative.

It’s part of our culture to put things in well-defined buckets; shades of gray make us nervous.

Back around 2009, some of my colleagues coined the term interim assessment to clarify that many assessment systems marketed as formative assessment, were not, in reality, formative assessment, inadvertently perhaps, creating a third bucket. About a decade later, other colleagues attempted to further clarify the nature of various assessment systems by redefining interim as a continuum between formative and summative, but it’s proven difficult to kick the notion of three buckets.  As I said, we like buckets.

Takeaway #2: State testing is not formative assessment

How then do we reclaim our roots and make state testing formative again?

Forging a Formative Future

It really shouldn’t be that difficult to frame state testing in formative terms. When you think about it, even just a little, it should be obvious that just about all aspects of PK-12 education are, or should be, formative. There are few, if any, hard stops in education. Everything is forward looking. Even our educational end points are framed as beginnings. Graduation (literally) signifies that a student has reached a new level in an ongoing progression. Commencement is self-explanatory.

What would state testing not be formative as well?

But am I advocating for a return to the good old days of state testing, to testing at grades 4, 8, and 10, to the days before it became common to report individual student results.

In a word, NO.

In fact, it should be even more natural to view education and state testing as formative rather than summative at the student level than at the school level.  

In large part due to advances in technology, it is now practical to monitor student progress across grade levels. That’s a good thing; and the benefits of being able to monitor student progress, in my opinion, outweigh the risks and downsides, including fears of too much testing or too much data.

We will need to adjust our mindset and think of student education longitudinally as an ongoing process from early childhood through secondary school (postsecondary?)  rather than cross-sectionally or in grade-level buckets (there’s those buckets again). Adjusting our mindset will inevitably lead to uncovering the need to adjust what we report, how we report it, and even the type of analyses we conduct to generate test scores and interpret test results. It won’t be easy, but that, too, is a good thing.

And in terms of school-level results, we must return to a formative evaluation focus on school improvement. That means doing a better job of connecting curriculum, instruction, and assessment at the state level in order to provide better and more coherent support to districts and schools. Again, a good thing.

Before I close, I will say that I was tempted here to draw a sharp contrast between a focus on formative evaluation and the current focus on accountability. Even earlier in the post, I considered including accountability as the third cause of state testing shifting from formative to summative. The more I thought about it, however, that seemed like too lazy an approach to an explanation.

 There is nothing inherent in the largely toothless federal accountability requirements that precludes a response in which the interpretation of state testing results is grounded in formative evaluation. Targeted support and improvement, comprehensive support and improvement, long-term and interim goals – that all sounds pretty formative to me. Perhaps accountability is a loaded term and we have certainly done a poor marketing job with respect to accountability (I’m look at you “failing schools” and “A-F” grades), but beyond our surface-level tendency to place accountability, evaluation, and improvement in separate buckets, accountability, per se, is not the barrier that we might think that it is.

Consistent with the discussion of student-level results above, we must expand our mindset on accountability from our current annual, cross-sectional focus to also include a longitudinal focus – one that helps us better understand how curriculum and instruction flow across grade levels and how students progress through a school system.

 The future of state testing, therefore, like its past is formative…Ready for it?

 

Image by G.C. from Pixabay