Presentation (Transcript)

Presentation (Transcript)

Instr. Assessments

Transcript for Lesson 4 Presentation:
Preparing Students for Testing and Assessment

	Assessment Literacy The term "assessment literacy" is relatively new in the educational community. Its use has been spurred by the tremendous vocabulary and methodology that has arisen around assessments, particularly district and state tests. While you do not need to become a psychometric expert to understand tests and to help prepare students to improve their performance on them, you should have some knowledge of the basics of assessment terminology and philosophy. This knowledge will help you know what to emphasize and what to ignore as you help students improve their test performance. Some basic terminology, which you may or may not already know, is provided in Lesson 4 Glossary. These are some of the terms that may be used to describe the tests that your students are required to take. As you come across some of the terms of assessment in this lesson, you can refer back to these definitions. As you work with your students to help them understand state and district tests that they will be taking, it is important for you to check that they understand what you are talking about. They will need assessment literacy, just as you do. In addition, there are certain points that you need to make about state and district assessments so that students understand their purpose, the meaning of scores, and the implications of how they do when they take them.
	Discuss the Purpose of Tests. Primary points to remember about district and state tests is that they may have either high stakes consequences (those that have a significant impact) or low stakes consequences (those that have relatively minimal impact), and the consequences may apply to either the student, the educational system (districts, schools, administrators, staff), or both. Of course, the way in which you explain these concepts will vary with the age of the students with whom you are working. Nevertheless, even students in early elementary grades need some explanation of these concepts.
	Discuss the Nature of the Test. It is important for students to be prepared for the test by having a sense of familiarity with it, even though they have never seen it. To provide them with this sense of familiarity, you will need to know the test well. This means that you need to know more than just the content area tested, or that the test is norm-referenced or criterion referenced. Nearly every test developed today conforms to a test matrix that describes the types of items and nature of content included in the test. This includes those tests developed by test publishers and those developed by state departments or school districts. Obtain a matrix for the test for which you are preparing students. You should be able to get one from your district research and evaluation division, from the state department of education, or from the test publisher. Often, the test matrix is provided in the test's manual. It is well worth the effort to obtain this matrix because its contents can both help provide the familiarity that is needed and guide practice sessions and worksheets that you provide to your students. The percentage of time that you spend on different types of concepts, skills, and strategies can directly correspond to the percentage of these types of items that will appear on the test - if you have the test matrix to guide your preparation activities. A test matrix can be further expanded to directly show the links to needed instruction. Long Beach Unified School District in Southern California has done this to take the Stanford 9 test matrix a step farther (Please refer to Handout #1). By doing this, teachers know not only what content is tested, but also how it is tested, what specific types of items are used, and what prerequisite skills are needed. Knowledge about the state and district tests and about the characteristics of students with disabilities is now generating renewed interest in how to ensure that these tests accurately measure what students know and can do.
	Setting Performance Goals (and Expectations) Psychology is well known for its identification of expectation effects. The "Pygmalion effect" described the strong influence that expectations had on how students performed and behaved. Another effect, the Hawthorne effect, is well-known for its explanation of what happens when attention is given to one individual but not to another. Differences in performance and behavior are substantial between the attention and no attention individuals, an effect that can be large enough to account for all differences between the two. This effect is not unlike the Placebo effect, where a patient may respond to a sugar pill simply because it looks like medicine. We humans are subject to all kinds of laws of nature, but the effects of expectations are among the more interesting, surprising, and significant in terms of their effects of life-important outcomes. As you probably know, these effects also can have tremendous effects on test performance. It is a wise educator who keeps these effects in mind. At a minimum, it is important not to interfere with performance because of an ill-spoken phrase here or there. Researchers have found that simple statements can have significant influences on the test performance of students. For example, when girls where informed that they typically performed worse than boys on a test that was about to be administered, indeed they did perform worse. This occurred even though the boys and girls had been picked because they had demonstrated the same level of knowledge and skills on the content and format of the test. Today, almost all tests that are used for accountability purposes are linked back to some kind of proficiency level score so that when reporting scores, they can be "meaningfully" tied to concepts like "proficient," "beginner," and "beyond proficient." This way, districts and states can report on the number and percentage of students falling in each proficiency level. Even when proficiency levels are not defined, there typically are cut points where scores above the points are okay and scores below them are not okay. The first step in being able to define what a student has to do to perform adequately on a test is to know the relationship between the number of items on the test and the way that the test is scored. For example, many state and district tests have anywhere from 30 to 50 test items. But, these items may be translated into scores like 560 or 1120. Scores often are derived using complex statistical formulas that actually serve a very useful function in developing good defensible tests. But, translating a complex score into a concrete plan like "You need to get 16 of the 30 items right to get a passing score" can do a lot to ease the anxiety that may be created when you and the student have no concept of what the student really has to do to perform adequately. Having this kind of information at hand also can be extremely useful when the purpose of the test is for determining whether the student moves from one grade to the next or earns a high school diploma. These student accountability decisions are determined primarily by test scores. This knowledge becomes even more critical if the student must retake the test. Being able to define the number of additional items that the student needs to answer correctly often is very helpful and calming to the student. When the purpose of the test is school accountability, with consequences being assigned to schools or staff or administrators, the motivation for simply doing one's best may be lacking. However, by transforming the test taking into an effort to increase your score, the student can be helped to become self-motivated to do well. One way to do this is to give students a practice test that you score and derive a percentage correct score. Setting a slightly higher level of performance as a goal for the student to achieve is one way to increase motivation for doing well on the test. Link this to class grades or to student rewards to ensure not only that the student is motivated and scores as well as possible, but also as an avenue to teaching students about how to develop their own reward systems. Students can use this reward-producing skill in a variety of areas of life, so this kind of effort is well worthwhile for both you the educator and the student. Identifying realistic goals can be assisted by knowing how the student has performed in the past (or is performing now) on content similar to that in the test. If your state or district gives its assessment yearly (or even every other year), information on past test performance should be directly relevant to your goal setting activities. In this situation, it is important to review past test performance to help guide current test performance. Because you have more than one student about whom you need to be concerned, it is often helpful to put this information into a chart. While not absolutely necessarily, it is often beneficial to also recheck the IEP of each student with a disability for the information it has about accommodations the student needs. Be sure that accommodations you are using in class are reflected in the IEP. Check to see that you are providing all the accommodations in instruction. If needed, amend the student's IEP.
	Preparing for the Test While better understanding the test and its requirements and setting goals are both important steps in preparing for the test, they are not the bulk of the activities that need to be undertaken to be sure that students are prepared for the test. In this section, discussed are some specific ways to prepare your students for test taking. Next we will get into some approaches for ensuring that the actual taking of the test is done to the best of the student's ability and skills. As you will see, all of these techniques are ones that support the educational effort - they really do not take time away from instruction - they support instruction in ways that make future teaching of the student more efficient and effective. What a bonus - test scores improve and learning improves. The strategies and techniques presented here assume that you have already reviewed the test matrix, planned to cover the topics reflected in the matrix with about the same degree of emphasis, looked at the past performance of students, and set with the student realistic goals for performance on the test. Given these background steps, what else needs to be done? Lots! You can pick and choose among the strategies and techniques based on your informed judgment about student needs and time available.
	Review General Test Vocabulary Terms. Few of the more recent resources on test taking refer to test vocabulary as an essential part of preparing to take tests. Yet, there are key words that are used in tests, and it is usually dangerous to assume that students know what these words mean in the testing situation. It is best to make sure that they do. Words and phrases like "contrast," "most accurate," and a host of others often have special meaning in testing situations.
	Review Specific Content Area Terms. While teaching the vocabulary of a content area is a natural part of instruction, it is worthwhile to review key terms prior to taking tests in the content area. Having a broad and well-established vocabulary is clearly an advantage when taking tests. That is why almost every test preparation course or text emphasizes the need to stress vocabulary. The fact that a student may receive an accommodation like having someone read the test or clarify the test directions does not negate the need for ensuring that students know the content area terms. The best way to ensure that students have a broad vocabulary, of course, is to have them reading a lot, being read to a lot, and always making sure that they know the words that they are reading or hearing. Likewise, it is important to include in every lesson some time to ensure that the vocabulary in the lesson is understood. Making vocabulary a part of everything in and out of the classroom is helpful. For example, if students are learning spelling, it is important that they learn not only how to combine the letter to get the word, but also to define what the word means and to show how to use the word in a sentence.
	Address the Administration of Tests. When students take district and state tests, especially those that are high stakes in some way, the tests themselves are handled differently from the way that most classroom tests are handled. To the extent that students are aware of these special administration procedures, the less likely the procedures themselves are to create stress and anxiety for the student taking the test. Overtly discussing these procedures, and experiencing them, can go a long way to improving test scores. At the same time, they familiarize students with the need to know what is going to happen in any special situation, and how to go about preparing for these unique situations. Some of the specific administration procedures that might be encountered in testing situations include bubbling in, stopping at certain points, not turning pages, and knowing whether to work fast or to work methodically. There are many other administration procedures that may be unique to the test the students are about to take. It will be important for you to be sure that you know what the specific administration procedures are that might be new to your students, and to be sure that they know about these and are exposed to them as they take practice tests.
	Provide General Strategies for Different Types of Items. While some state and district tests may use performance items or even portfolios, the most common types of items are those with which we are all familiar - True/False, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, and essay. These have been and continue to be the substance of testing, although the amount of emphasis given to each ebbs and flows with changes in perceptions about what learning should be like and about what particular types of items really test. You should not plan to give students information on types of test items that the students might never experience. But given your knowledge about the makeup of your state or district test (from the test matrix), provide students with brief instruction on approaches for various item types. Remember, however, that the type of item in a test should not completely determine the focus of instruction. There is some evidence that students who prepare for essay tests, regardless of the type of test administered, do better than students who prepare for the specific type of item in a test. There is similar information that can assist students prepare for tests in specific content areas. In their text "Teaching Test-Taking Skills: Helping Students Show What They Know," Scruggs and Mastropieri provide excellent examples of these types of strategies.
	Provide Practice Tests. While the old adage, "Practice makes perfect" may be carrying things too far, practice is important when it comes to taking tests. The more familiar students are with the format, procedures, and mechanics of testing, the more likely they are to perform better - even if nothing different has been done to the instruction that they receive. Obtain practice tests from your district or state assessment office. Develop your own practice items that are like those in the tests. Depending on the ages of your students, you might even have them attempt to develop items of each type that they will be taking. By doing this, the student begins to understand how tests relate to the content of a topic, thereby making it easier for them to study the "right stuff" in preparation for a test.
	Give Student One or More Test Taking Strategies. Today there are many test taking strategies available in books and journals, and even on the Internet. The teaching of such strategies almost always has been proven to be worthwhile. For example, a strategy developed just for test taking is called "SCORER." S - Schedule your time C - Clue words O - Omit difficult questions R - Read carefully E - Estimate your answer R - Review This strategy was developed by Ritter and Idol-Maestas; it is explained nicely in the book "Tools for Learning: A Guide to Teaching Study Skills" by M.D. Gall and others. By providing students with strategies like SCORER, they have a systematic and stable way to approach tests. This feeling of control over what they must do goes a long way to bolstering the confidence with which students with face tests, particularly students with disabilities. There are also a variety of "mini strategies" that can be useful. These are found scattered throughout various sources. They range from such simplistic advice as "read the test directions carefully" to tricks like "answer the easy questions first." Many of these mini strategies are picked up by good students on their own. Other students, particularly students with disabilities, typically do not pick up such strategies. Therefore the strategies need to be taught to these students. Not doing so provides other students with an unfair advantage. Most learning strategies have been developed for instruction rather than testing. Yet, many of the learning strategies could be adapted to apply to testing situations, depending on the needs of individual students.
	Taking the Test There have been numerous books and book chapters written on the topic of how to help students take tests successfully. Some of these have even focused on the test taking skills of students with disabilities. Several of these sources are listed in the Resource section of this lesson. Our purpose here is to reiterate some of the basic concepts in good test taking skills, and to focus in primarily on those with particular relevance to students with disabilities.
	Personal Strategies Test anxiety is a common reaction experienced by test takers, especially when they think that they will be affected in important ways by how well they perform on the test. Negative reactions to having to take a test in the past were often cited as one reason why students with disabilities should be excluded from state and district assessments. We know today that this is a very weak reason for excluding students with disabilities from tests. They should be prepared to take tests, to be alerted to the ways to cope with tests, and to know how to perform their best. Think about it as an adult. Why would you get test anxiety? Because you were not prepared for the test? Because you were not familiar with the test format? These reasons can be addressed. Traumatic reactions to test taking should be a thing of the past. What are some of the key personal strategies that test takers, especially test takers with disabilities need to learn? Self-regulation during testing, especially if the test is timed, and the related skills of time management are ones on which students should receive instruction in preparation for participating in a state or district test. This can be as simple as setting a kitchen timer and having the student work to complete tasks within a time limit. Finally, coping with potential stress during tests, positive thinking about test performance, and visualization of good test performance are additional personal strategies recommended by others. These certainly cannot hurt and most likely will significantly benefit students when they are taking tests. Time management and self-regulation of behavior are related strategies that are frequently mentioned in test preparation books. These, of course, are particularly key skills for students with disabilities, many of whom suffer from poor skills in these areas.
	Recommendations for Self Regulation and Time Management Strategies Be wise in the use of time. Use strategies that help you go through certain steps rather than getting bogged down by specific items. Practice monitoring your own time-on-task. Perhaps start by having an alarm clock set at intervals of 5 minutes. Each time the clock rings, mark on a log whether you are on tasks. Hone your on-task-skills to the point that you can maintain on-task behavior the entire duration of a test. If inability to do so is related to your disability, explore accommodations that might help your on-task behavior. Have everything that you need at your fingertips so that no unnecessary time is spent looking for, or retrieving, needed items (e.g., erasures, spare pencils, tissues, etc.). During practice tests, figure out good pacing strategies for you and for completing the test in a reasonable amount of time. Helping students to identify ways to cope with stress when it occurs, and getting back to a calm and productive state is another critical personal strategy that students, especially students with disabilities, will need to be taught. Again, books on test taking strategies often include these among their test taking hints. A first step in helping students to be able to do this is to help them recognize when a calm and productive state is disappearing. They need to know what these signs are, and that when they begin to occur, they need to do certain things. Those things will be individualized, so it will be necessary to determine with each student what things are indicators of increased stress (e.g., biting nails, extreme fatigue, etc.) and what strategies work to reduce that stress (e.g., self-talk, a moment with closed eyes, etc.). It is important to realize that some of these strategies might actually be accommodations for the student with disabilities. Thus, indicating that the student needs to listen to music while taking tests for extended time periods, might be the basis for an accommodation that should be written on an IEP. The sooner you and your students can figure out specific needs for coping and reducing stress, the more you will know, and the easier it will be to get these important strategies into the IEP in case they are viewed as accommodations rather than simply test-taking strategies. Positive thinking and visualization are also often mentioned as among important strategies for reducing stress and improving test performance. Positive thinking, for sure, is aided by adequate test preparation - by knowing the content! Research has demonstrated that positive thinking in and of itself, can help to boost test scores! Therefore, even off-handed comments that you or other adults make can affect the thinking of students and whether it is positive. Comments about the test being too hard, or noting that a student really should be taking a different test, when overheard by the student, can easily translate into negative thinking, resulting in poorer performance on the test than need be. It's the old self-fulfilling prophecy at work! Visualization is another strategy mentioned often by athletes, but one that is equally applicable to testing situations. Helping students to see themselves as good test takers, sitting up straight with a smile on their faces, is an example of visualization strategies. Encouraging them to visualize a rewarding experience after their best effort on the test is another example. Many other ways to produce good visualization skills exist and are often worth the time to help students to learn how to do this on their own.
	Using Accommodations Well Even though students have accommodations noted on their IEPs and have been using them during instruction, there are almost always ways to improve the way in which they are used. One important aspect of this, especially as students get older, is to make sure that the students know why they need the accommodations that they use, and that they are not embarrassed by their use (of course, this involves making sure that classmates also understand the need for accommodations). Evidence has been gathered that this is not always the case, and that students who need accommodations, and whose performance would certainly benefit from their use, may opt not to use them simply because they have not been helped to understand their importance. Howard Eaton, an individual diagnosed with significant developmental dyslexia provides lessons on self-advocacy that can be helpful in helping students to understand the importance of using accommodations and advocating for them. While his small book is designed to assist students make the transition from high school to college, many of his lessons are valuable for students in the K-12 system as well. One such lesson, entitled "Do your own academic work" concludes with the statement, "Do not ask your parents or teachers [to type papers, spell check, etc.]. Instead, learn how to ask your teachers for accommodations. Do your own academic work." It may also be important to let students know that how they perceive the use of accommodations may be different from how their classmates perceive them. Surveys of classmates of students with disabilities have revealed that the majority of these students are supportive of the use of accommodations by students with disabilities. Their concerns about fairness are raised only when students with disabilities are held to different standards for the same grades (for example, having to get fewer items correct). In a related vein, there are certain accommodations that are subject to malfunction. Despite the wonderfulness of various mechanical and technological accommodations, there is always the possibility that they will not work at the time of the test. These kinds of gliches have to be prepared for, so that should they occur, a backup is available, or as a last resort, plans have been okayed for movement to a different testing site (e.g., another school that has a computer not being used, etc.). Finally, in considering accommodations, it is extremely important to know the test and the policies about accommodations that apply to them. There are sometimes ways to help students get the benefit of what may be non-approved accommodations. For example, having someone read all directions to students is in many tests viewed as inappropriate. It is deemed to change the meaning and comparability of scores of students who have this done for them. On the other hand, in these same tests, it is considered appropriate for someone to read directions to a student if the student has raised his or her hand and asked that the directions be read. Thus, it would be helpful to explain this to the student, and if it is needed, agree with the student that he or she will raise his or her hand every time that a new set of directions are encountered, so that they can be read to the student.
	Physical and Mental Readiness Students who take tests, particularly when they have high stakes attached to them, should be physically and mentally ready for the test that they are to take. We have already touched on several points that will help students in this endeavor, such as developing coping and calming strategies. The need for physical readiness is also important, but one that generally is pushed back to the home. But, it is not only the home that should take ownership of this responsibility. It is important for tests not to be scheduled after physical education activities, or even, perhaps, after lunch. Fresh air in the testing site, air that is neither to cold or too hot, is another important avenue to ensuring physical readiness. You can identify several factors in your school that have an impact on physical and mental readiness. Identify these on papers, and indicate what will be done to address each one of them.
	Helping Students Become Advocates for Their Own Testing Needs Students must become advocates for their own testing needs, especially as they become older. This is a critical skill for them to have as they transition into high school, into post-secondary education, and later into the world of work. The skills needed, however, are not just being able to ask for what is needed. Of course, this is the most critical skill. But, beyond that, it is important for the student to know how and when to ask for accommodations in the most appropriate manner possible. This involves developing interpersonal skills that some students lack. These should be a focus of instruction, since, hopefully, they are among the IEPs goals set for students who lack appropriate skills when advocating for themselves.