Smarter Balanced Field Test Part 1

Welcome to the Smarter Balance Encounter.  My name is Steven Santiago and I am a sixth grade teacher with 16 years of teaching experience in an elementary school setting. This blog will follow the experience I gain with the new testing structure for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  The company in California decided to align its testing obligations with is the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.  With the new standards comes new testing procedures.  Pencil and paper state testing is part of the past and now starts a new era of measuring student achievement and teacher accountability.

This week my 6th grade students were part of a district wide stress test to ensure the infrastructure within the district can handle the load of a many computers on the network at once.  Every school in the district participated in this pre-field test of the Smarter Balanced online test of the CCSS.  The field test is a trial run of the assessment system that helps ensure the assessments are valid, reliable, and fair for all students. It also gives teachers and schools a chance to gauge their readiness in advance of the first operational assessment in spring 2015.

The stress test actually provided my students and me with a good preview of what to expect for the field test as well as any issues we may had with the mobile computer lab we are using for the actual field test. We discovered, first hand, students now have to contend with three issues. 

The first issue is the understanding how to use the new laptops and understanding the sign in procedures.  While this not too much of an issue at 6th grade, I can only imagine the time management issues 3rd graders will have.  Hopefully, now that we have two mobile labs to share throughout the school,  teachers will make the task of logging into a computer a common practice like knowing how to use a cell phone to call a friend or home.  When using the computers to answer the essay questions, we fount that the touchpads on the laptops were accidentally tapped by some students moving the curser to a different part of their answer resulting in an incoherent answer or accidentally highlighting their answer only to erase a portion of it when they continue to type.  Many of the student are not proficient in typing and they do not look at the screen to see what they are typing, rather look at the keyboard to find the appropriate keys to type.  When they look up to see what they have typed it was not what they had hoped.  When examining the new laptops it was discovered there was not an easy way to turn off the touchpad for the test.  We supplied every computer with a mouse because it is easier to manipulate the pointer with it than the touchpad.

The next issue has to do with the format of the test.  The design of the test is not to difficult for the students to learn, but there is a learning curve involved.  The best way to explain this is comparing it to a new video game kids begin to play.  At first it is difficult, and they play at the easy setting, soon after they understand the controls and the objective of the game, they become more proficient and they increase the difficulty to gain a better gamming experience.  This test is like a new game to the students.  Once they understand the controls they can concentrate on the objective and the format will soon not be an issue.  When we did the stress test, they took the Language Arts practice test.  The first four questions required for different ways of answering a question.  First, they were to select the sentence to answer the question, next a short essay answer, then a multiple choice question, finally they were to select three sentences tat apply.  End of page one. There are other forms of answering questions as well as responding to content they are to listen to.

The third issue is remembering what they have learned throughout the year.  This is an issue students have to deal with no matter what kind of test is administered.  When all three concerns are addressed we hope to make the students will be more comfortable with the new assessment process.

We are now in the works to get the teachers involved in getting the students familiar with the equipment and the format of the test before the official field testing begins... I'll let you know how it goes.