Track Sessions: High-quality Assessments for All Students
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High-Quality Assessment for All Students Sessions in Alphabetical Order
Advances in Validity Evidence for Alternate Assessments
Alternate assessments have evolved considerably in the last two decades. Given their relatively short history, alternate assessments are more susceptible to having inadequate validation evidence than other large-scale assessments (Clark & Karvonen, 2020). This session highlights new methodologies for collecting evidence about the validity of alternate academic and English language proficiency assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities. Presenters share methods to establish evidence for construct and linguistic processes for state required alternate assessments. Other topics of discussion are measurement of academic growth, methods for evaluating alignment of achievement standards to skills needed in postsecondary environments, and approaches for evaluating the impact of COVID-19 on instruction and assessment. Presenters address the need for flexibility while maintaining valid interpretations of scores and connect the studies to the Standards for Testing and peer review criteria. A measurement expert will discuss findings relative to existing frameworks for alternate assessment validation.
Session Presenters: Melissa Gholson, Meagan Karvonen, Kelly Bacher, Phoebe Winter, Edynn Sato
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Alternate Assessments: Current Landscape, Looking Toward the Horizon
Alternate assessment provide challenges to states as they attempt to deliver meaningful assessments to students with varied abilities. Prior to Race to the Top, many states used portfolio assessments to measure the performance of students with significant cognitive disabilities, and states have now moved to some type of performance task/item-based assessment. A variety of test designs have been utilized for this population and the results of these assessments should provide meaningful information for parents and case conference committees. Current alternate assessment designs include stage-adaptive assessments, computer-adaptive tests, and learning maps. This presentation will present these designs while posing questions regarding alternate assessments, including whether there is a best design for this particular population, if states have different goals for these students and how alternate assessment designs meet these needs, and how the field can learn from these designs to continue to advance assessment of these children.
Session Presenters: Kristine David, Karlynn Laraway, Theresa Bennett, Marianne Perie
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 2:10 PM – 3:10 PM ET
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Balanced Assessment Systems Start with Assessment Literacy
Twenty years after Knowing What Students Know (NRC, 2001) called for comprehensive, coherent and continuous assessment systems states and districts are still struggling to ensure that teachers and other stakeholders have sufficient assessment literacy to develop and use assessments that meet these goals. The first presenter will situate work on assessment literacy as a critical support for the design and implementation of balanced assessment systems. The second, third, and fourth presenters will focus on projects that support the articulation of what it means to be assessment literate as a prerequisite to establishing truly balanced assessment systems. The final presentation will provide a state perspective on their motivation to focus on assessment literacy and the approach taken. We will conclude the session with an open Q&A session among presentations and the audience, and invite everyone to make connections across the presentations.
Session Presenters: Erika Landl, Edward Roeber, Scott Norton, Maxey Moore, Caroline Wylie
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
CCSSO National Conference on Student Assessment Newcomer Session
This session is intended for persons who are attending the conference for the first or second time. Come learn about the history of the conference and why it is so beloved. More importantly, discover how the conference program is structured, and learn how to get the maximum value out of the sessions. You will have the opportunity to network with other attendees and leave with resources and contacts for your work back home.
Session Presenters: Edynn Sato, Edward Roeber
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM ET
Developing an Alternate English Language Proficiency Assessment within a Principled Design Framework
The development of an alternate English Language Proficiency (ELP) assessment for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities is challenging. For example:
- There is no agreed-upon definition of the population of English Learners with the most significant cognitive disabilities (ELSCDs).
- The population of students who could be eligible for an alternate ELP assessment is highly diverse
- The construct (ELP) may manifest for this student population in ways not typically observed in general assessments.
Few subject matter experts exist for ELSCDs - There is little research or models to draw on
The presenters and discussant describe and discuss a coordinated effort to address these challenges. Presenters supporting the Collaborative for the Alternate Assessment of English Language Proficiency (CAAELP) will describe:
- a principled, explicitly-iterative validity framework supporting assessment system coherence,
- relevant assessment design features and considerations,
- the iterative development of PLDs,
- item development and alignment strategies, and
- psychometric models and reporting metrics
Session Presenters: Daniel Lewis, Edynn Sato, Kelly Ickes, Nami Shin, Li Cai, Audra Ahumada
Session Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
Developing Student Engagement in the Formative Assessment Process
In this session, we provide evidence of the impact of the formative assessment process and how teachers cultivate student engagement and buy-in. Through a series of focus group interviews with students, we asked students about their experiences in school, how they approached school, and how they decided how to direct their effort while in class. We also interviewed teachers about how they work with all students to engage them in academic work using the formative assessment process and we further probed about how teachers engage students who are low achieving or resistant. We will summarize the findings of the student perspectives and teacher strategies through the presentation. Presenters will include both researchers and teachers.
Session Presenters: John Lane, Lindsey Howe, Mary Helen Diegel
Session Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 2:10 PM – 3:10 PM ET
Item Specifications and Task Models—Who’s Doing What? Why?
Principled assessment design (PAD) approaches like Evidence Centered Design (ECD) and Assessment Engineering prescribe task models to guide test item development. Some organizations take a principled approach but use enhanced item specifications rather than task models. How much are task models, versus item specifications, actually used? Do task models provide value over item specifications? What about implementation fidelity of PAD tools, relative development time and financial costs, and so forth? In this session, four organizations will describe their practices and address these questions. A discussant will consider these four organizations’ approaches to item specification and task models from practical, efficacy, and validity argument points of view.
Session Presenters: Steve Ferrara, Dave Sanderson, Jim Mirabelli, Paul Nichols, Kristen Huff, Molly Faulkner-Bond
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Multiple Voices; Multiple Perspectives: Communities Defining Success
This symposium will present the idea of community engagement as a way of building validity and relevance. Both states have engaged in validation efforts with their stakeholders to ensure instruments measure the highest priority areas for their communities. Presenters will describe how they worked with a diverse group of community members to include multiple perspectives that support transparency, buy-in, and ownership. Each project will also provide concrete examples of how these discussions support technical quality and an overall validity argument. The discussant will engage the presenters and audience in a conversation about how the ideas of community engagement can bring about deep changes in assessment that are especially relevant in light of larger systemic inequities highlighted by COVID-19. These changes include broader considerations and definitions of success derived from the communities. We will also consider how these processes of engagement might inform other assessment programs in states and districts.
Session Presenters: Kerry Englert, Lucy Fredericks, Pohai Kūkea Shultz, Pono Fernandez
Session Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 2:10 PM – 3:10 PM ET
Navigating Rough Waters of Assessment Policy, Practice and Implementation
Policy, legislation, and rules are constantly changing and state leaders of assessment and accountability systems must thoughtfully navigate these changes. This proposal highlights examples of these mandated changes, considerations for engaging with key stakeholder groups, and strategies to navigate the competing balances across all of these things. The presentation highlights multiple perspectives including assessment experts who offer guidance to state programs, along with current assessment directors from Michigan and Indiana. Examples of policy changes, strategies for implementation, and the intersection of national policy and advisement will be discussed.
Session Presenters: Charity Flores, Juan D’Brot, Andy Middlestead, Edward Roeber
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
New Meridian Science Exchange: A Contributing and Subscribing State Perspective
Developing new science assessment items is a lengthy and expensive process, especially items that align to the NGSS. States must devote significant resources and draw from a pool of limited assessment experts to construct quality items. States would benefit from a quality-controlled common item bank and a strong partner to guide their development of new science assessments. Partnering with states to develop high-quality assessments that are focused on ensuring students’ understanding is specifically why New Meridian set out to launch the Science Exchange program. This program’s purpose is to provide all states access to high-quality science assessment throughout the country by sharing items and task models among states.
The purpose of this session is to outline how the New Meridian Science Exchange works, and to allow two of our state partners to offer their views on how they are using the Science Exchange to meet their goals in advancing science education.
Session Presenters: Christopher Lazzaro, Christina McCreary, Shari Templeton
Session Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
Rebalancing Assessment Systems: What Can We Do Now and in the Future to Support Balanced Systems of Assessment?
The calls to balance assessment systems—actually rebalance these systems—are motivated by the desire to enhance the utility of assessments for improving learning and instruction, this year more than ever, as well as for monitoring and accountability. Such calls recognize the outsize influence state assessments have on the system. This session focuses on ways we might right-size the state assessment to foster balanced assessment system implementation. National assessment experts and leading state and district assessment leaders will offer design and policy proposals for reducing the “footprint” of end-of-year summative tests in support of balanced assessment system implementation. Anticipating a reauthorization of ESEA, we aim to provide examples for legislators and staffers about possible approaches for meeting the equity goals of ESEA while avoiding the onerousness of NCLB and ESSA-type state tests.
Session Presenters: Scott Marion, Lorrie Shepard, Peter Leonard, Gwen Warniment
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Revisiting the Read-Aloud Accommodation on Assessments of Reading Comprehension
Determining when to allow a read-aloud accommodation on a reading assessment continues to be an issue across the country. Reading comprehension is traditionally defined as the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. But, certain disabilities interfere with a test taker’s ability to process text. Thus, a policy decision must be made as to whether that deficiency supersedes all, or whether it is important to understand a student’s ability to comprehend meaning and integrate that knowledge with preexisting knowledge, regardless of how the information is inputted. This session includes a panel discussion of these issues from multiple perspectives: a disabilities expert, a state-level reading specialist, a state assessment director, and a psychometrician specializing in validity arguments. Current practice, a dissection of standards, an analysis of various reading disabilities, and validity in score interpretation will be among the topics discussed.
Session Presenters: Marianne Perie, Martha Thurlow, Charity Flores, Christina McCreary
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 2:10 PM – 3:10 PM ET
Roadmap to a Reading CAT
States are increasingly moving to computer adaptive testing for its many advantages. Compared to traditional linear tests, adaptive tests can be shorter and more robust, leaving more valuable student time open for instruction, while achieving comparable or higher levels of measurement precision and shorter reporting timelines. Adaptively testing reading ability can be challenging due to the passage-based structure of such assessments. We invite three states, Virginia, Minnesota, and Maryland, to discuss how they are implementing or planning to implement adaptive reading assessments, in very different ways. This symposium will lay out a “Roadmap to a Reading CAT” by explicating each state’s approach around overall structure of the assessment, testlets used within the reading test, possible use of standalone items, blueprint compliance and challenges in successfully implementing a reading CAT. The presenters will also discuss the additional implementation challenges due to COVID.
Session Presenters: Ye Tong, Shelley Loving-Ryder, Gerald Griph, Jennifer Judkins, Jennifer Dugan
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
State Processes for Reviewing Individual Student Unique Accommodation Requests and Including New Accommodations in State Assessment Policies
Federal legislation and regulations require that states provide access so that all students—including students with disabilities, English learners, and English learners with disabilities—can participate in district- or state-wide assessments. Some students need to use accommodations not included in current policies to participate. In this symposium, states’ approaches and procedures for (a) requesting unique accommodations; (b) approving these requests, and (c) examining the potential need to incorporate new accommodations into state assessment policies, will be presented. This session will open with a short overview of unique accommodations and relevant laws and requirements, then three states will share how they handle unique accommodations requests. State and local education agency professionals, test vendors, and anyone else who is curious about unique accommodations will find this session useful. There will be ample time at the end of this symposium for the robust discussion that is sure to unfold.
Session Presenters: Chris Rogers, Susan Forbes, Deirdre Ducharme, Sheryl Lazarus, Bobby Richardson, Andrew Hinkle
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Statewide Testing During a Pandemic: The Challenges of Conducting Secure and Valid State Assessments in 2020-21
With COVID-19 suddenly impacting educational systems across the country, testing in Spring 2020 offered many new challenges and uncertainties in the form of a pandemic, which ultimately led to the cancellation of statewide testing. States had to pivot quickly to come up with plans for conducting assessments in the coming year. With distance learning and remote testing increasingly being used, the security of assessments came into question along with how to maintain validity. Many new approaches were designed/developed by states. This session promises to inform participants of many new challenges and lessons learned from three states who securely administered tests in 2020-21. Among the challenges discussed are secure testing in remote environments, use of remote proctors, data forensics approaches to detect possible cheating, increased monitoring of the Internet and social media for disclosed assessment materials, and how scores from statewide summative assessments were validated and utilized.
Session Presenters: John Olson, Walt Drane, Timothy Butcher, Charity Flores, Michol Stapel
Session Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Successfully and Equitably Measuring Student Achievement during a Pandemic
States have recently embarked on initiatives to support or provide districts with high-quality, low-stakes assessment options to support educators and students in K-2 or K-8 with actionable data. During this 60-minute moderated symposium, two states and an urban district will provide an explanation of their approaches to the evaluation of high-quality assessments, lessons learned during statewide and district implementation, highlight bright spots as well as challenges indicated in the results, and discuss best practices to inform instructional decisions when using data from a high-quality diagnostic assessment.
Session Presenters: Juan D’Brot, Andy Middlestead, Sarah Courtemanche, Sheree Baird
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 2:10 PM – 3:10 PM ET
Technology-Enhanced Items and Three-Dimensional Standards: Innovation and Lessons Learned
Technology-enhanced items (TEIs) offer novel ways to assess the multidimensionality of the NGSS and related state standards. However, not all TEIs are created equal, and not all TEIs have equal utility. How can we ensure that the TEIs used in an assessment assess what we are intending to assess, and work for all subgroups of students? Representatives from two state assessment programs will share how detailed response data have allowed them to determine the shared features of successful TEIs, best practices in development of TEIs to specific Science and Engineering Practices, how disaggregated data can be used to compare performance for subgroups, and how to modify TEIs so these innovative items contribute to valid assessment arguments for all students.
Session Presenters: Veronica Zonick, Matt Silberglitt, Danna Clinton, M.Ed., April McCrae, Ed.D., Leah Boulton, M.Ed.+30, NBCT
Session Date & Time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 3:40 PM – 4:40 PM ET
The recipe for a judgment: Unpacking how policy, content expertise, social influences, and cognitive processes impact standard setting judgments
In this session, the presenters will share a framework for organizing and selecting a standard setting approach that is focused on the cognitive judgmental task required of the expert panelists and how this is operationalized and how other factors can influence this judgmental process. The presenters will focus parts of this discussion as to how this may play out in a typical standard setting but also in atypical standard setting activities such as those influenced by COVID-19. The discussant will provide commentary as to how the presented framework connects to the operationalization of standard setting methodologies.
Session Presenters: Susan Davis-Becker, Steve Ferrara, Jim Pellegrino
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 3:40 PM – 4:40 PM ET
The Resurgence of Interim Assessment—Bringing Teaching and Testing Back Together
Following the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, K-12 testing experienced a massive expansion as states sought to leverage end-of-year summative tests as tools for accountability purposes. However, this led to concerns that summative tests generally do not provide the type of data that teachers find valuable in terms of informing instructional decisions.
In contrast to summative assessments, interim assessments are typically given multiple times a year and tend to be perceived as lower stakes than summative assessments. As such, they can be designed to support teaching and learning throughout the year. Interim assessments can be used by educators to evaluate student progress, to create instructional groupings, to support decisions about whole class instruction, and to support personalized learning. In this session, presenters will discuss how interim assessments can complement classroom, formative, and summative assessments to provide teachers actionable information to drive learning.
Session Presenters: Katie McClarty, Michelle Barrett, Laurie Davis, Ann Ellefson, Stanley Schauer
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 3:40 PM – 4:40 PM ET
What’s a Fair Test? Past, Present and Future of Fair and Equitable State Assessments
The call for fairness has preoccupied leaders of American education systems − from initial commitment to equal opportunity to the current reality of the covid-19 pandemic. This session examines fairness, first from historical and technical perspectives, and then from the standpoint of federal peer review. Goals of the session are to (a) provide historical and current context, (b) overview of technical requirements, and (c) identify practical ways states and consortia can address fairness in the design, development, administration, and uses of their high-stakes assessments. We make recommendations for addressing fairness as described by peer review guidance (U.S. Department of Education, 2018) and professional standards. Presenters provide considerations of fairness for state academic and language proficiency assessments, as well as for addressing specific subgroup populations. Approaches for special studies to evaluate fairness, how fairness relates to validity, and the role of continuous improvement in assessment plans are presented.
Session Presenters: Anne Davidson, Jill Christmus, Kristine David, Danielle Guzman-Orth, Melissa Gholson, Edynn Sato
Session Date & Time: Monday, June 21, 2021 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET