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Smarter Balance is a state-led consortium to develop new online assessment tool for Common Core State Standards. Michigan legislature is supporting to implement this tool during 2014-15 school year for the first time. It is not only surprising but scary in some sense to provide an assessment tool that is remotely user friendly with clumsy interface to school children. I am also surprised to read that this consortium is led by assessment professionals from 26 states, more than half the country. However, smartly the assessment questions in Math and English might have been designed, the tool that presents these seemingly smart assessment questions to school children should be far more intuitive than what it is now. Smarter Balance falls way short in this regard.
That brings to question why would a State like Michigan decide to subject its students to this?
According to American Community Survey, approximately 32.43% of Michigan's population has only earned an Associates Degree. Michigan has a lower percentage of people with a Bachelor's Degree than the United States. With the state of affairs like this, why would the State scare away its students from aspiring for higher education by implementing assessment tools like these.
Simple paper based examination gives students an idea about required time allocation per question when looking at question paper in its entirety. There is less cognitive overload involved when dealing set of papers which one can flip, turn, do rough work on and revise. Apart from being straining to eyes, these tests seem to provide extra burden to brain simply because of its user unfriendliness. That is not to say, all computer based assessment tools are same. There are quite a few of them that are very easy to navigate and answer like ALEKS and IXL. These are membership based online training and assessment materials that only privileged few can afford. Is Michigan Department of education aware of latest standards in human-computer interaction? Why is there no interest in providing Michigan students the cutting edge technological advantage ? Or at least leave them alone with paper based assessment which is far superior to the proposed computer based test.
Subha,
ReplyDeleteI had not even considered this: ...why would the State scare away its students from aspiring for higher education by implementing assessment tools like these."
Great point. I'm curious, how do you plan to approach this flawed system next year, when you have the autonomy in your classroom? Will you explicitly teach technology skills, and if so, how will they be embedded into your lessons?
By no means do I expect a definitive answer but it's something you'll definitely be thinking about all year.
Interesting stuff!
I think your take on the Smarter Balance Assessments is very interesting. I never thought about how a student's technological skills (or lack their of) would scare them away. I only thought about it in the sense that students will have an easier time with the test. You bring up another issue in that student's anxiety level is higher when they don't have the skills to prepare them. Do you think providing students with technology classes would be beneficial to decrease this anxiety?
ReplyDeleteYour take on the Smarter Balance Assessments is one that I agree with completely! In particular, when you said, "why would the State scare away its students from aspiring for higher education by implementing assessment tools like these." This is an excellent point! Why would we scare students away and possible prevent them being successful by making them a test online that is difficult to follow and clumsy.
ReplyDeleteHow can we fight against this? I realize we always generalize and say that the next generation is more tech savvy than we are, but not everyone is. Thanks for sharing!
You do a really great job of laying out the reasons why paper-based tests are less like cognitive overload to students. They are able to flip back and forth, to assess how many questions of what length they will encounter, and they are able to take notes. I think that assessing the length of the document is especially important for students taking an English examination. One must know how many articles they will have to read, and of what length the articles are, in order to assess how much time they will need to take on each. Maybe there are shorter texts that will require less time than others. It is more difficult to scroll through a test on computer, and sometimes one may not pass the first section without completing it, especially for tests where the questions are changed based on whether one answers correctly or incorrectly. Most of the evidence points to paper-based testing being superior to computer-based, yet the allure of insta-scoring seems to be strong for administrators.
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