Tens of thousands of students will spend more time on testing this spring, as Illinois launches an unprecedented “field test” of new state exams in more than 2,000 schools — about half the schools in the state.
Aimed at grades three to 11, the practice tests will be piled on top of the usual state exams for public grade school and high school students in March and April, adding several hours of testing for many and extending exam-taking into early June, the Tribune has learned.
The added exams have spawned a labyrinth of testing scenarios from district to district, school to school and even from classroom to classroom, creating one of the most complex and confusing exam seasons in decades, state data show.
In sprawling Schaumburg-based School District 54, for example, all 27 elementary and junior high schools will have varied combinations of tests. Students in some grades will take the usual Illinois Standards Achievement Tests. Others will take one or two field tests, plus one or more ISATs.
All that extra testing is paving the way for the state to replace the old tests, most notably the ISAT, with tougher reading and math exams in 2015 designed to better prepare kids for college and work. Local educators say this year’s field tests will help students get used to an online format, longer testing sessions and the complex tasks, questions and writing exercises in the new exams.
This testing blitz stems from a national movement to increase the rigor of what students should know by emphasizing academic standards that focus on deeper study of more limited topics, critical thinking and analytical skills. Most states have signed on to these Common Core State Standards.
But detractors — including some grass-roots organizations, parents and lawmakers — question whether they will propel achievement.
No one disputes that for many Illinois students, this spring will be a test.
At Troy Shorewood School in Will County, one class of third-graders and one class of fourth-graders, about 45 students total, will take online field tests in math. Teachers have retooled instruction for at least three years to make sure students can master the advanced skills needed to tackle the new exams, said Principal Julie Mancione.
In a recent math class, third-graders were discussing the “commutative property” of addition — a pre-algebra concept the youngsters had to know and parents may not remember. (It means you can add two or more numbers in any order and get the same sum.)
Down the hall, fourth-graders were solving multiplication problems and working on alternative ways to come up with the same number through various computations.
“I think we’re happy to be on the ground level” of field testing, Mancione said. “I feel like we’re contributing to the long-term picture, and I think that’s an important variable for everybody.”
She acknowledged, “We know we don’t want to assess kids too much,” but she said one math field test in two grades “is not a huge burden.”
But the testing time will add up. Sometime between March 3 and 14, those third- and fourth-graders will take reading and math ISATs, totaling four hours, 30 minutes. The fourth-graders also will take an ISAT science test of 90 minutes. Between March 24 and April 11, those students will take the math field test lasting at least one hour, 40 minutes. If they need extra time, they can take up to 21/2 hours.
Testing times will vary depending on grade, subject and number of field tests. The English tests are longer, ranging from two to 31/2 hours per test, excluding any extra time needed.
Some students will wind up taking two field tests because there’s also an “end-of-year” exam scheduled between May 5 and June 6.
So, for example, 11th-graders taking both English field tests would have at least five hours and 50 minutes of testing. That’s on top of their usual state exam in late April, the Prairie State Achievement Examination, which will last at least five hours, 35 minutes.
At Lake County’s Adlai E. Stevenson High School, spokesman Jim Conrey said, “Our kids are used to a lot of testing, so I’m not sure it’s that big of a burden.”
At Stevenson, students will take the field tests with old-fashioned paper and pencil rather than online. That’s because some schools may not be ready technologically to take online exams in 2015 and test developers want to see how paper exams play out.
Field testing of the new Common Core-based exams, involving millions of students, is taking place across the country this spring through various state testing organizations.
Illinois is part of a group of more than a dozen states called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, PARCC for short. The organization is developing new Common Core-based exams in English language arts/literacy and mathematics for third- through 11th-graders for Illinois and other states in the coalition.
Overall, about 148,000 Illinois students are expected to field test those exams, slightly more than 10 percent of third- through 11th-grade students.
The goal is to “identify any questions that may be flawed,” said Jeff Nellhaus, an official at PARCC. A question, he said, might reflect certain biases or other problems.
Results from the field testing won’t be given to schools or parents, he said, because “we’re testing questions, not the kids, not the school.”
Bob Schaeffer, of the FairTest nonprofit group critical of the misuse of standardized tests, has concerns about field testing on such a massive scale. New tests normally take several years to develop, he said, with trial questions inserted into annual exams, or a handful of schools agreeing to experiment with a new version.
Though PARCC disagrees, Schaeffer said he believes the process of building brand-new Common Core-based tests has been rushed, and so now developers “are pressing schoolchildren and classrooms to become unpaid guinea pigs to try out the exam.”
Illinois has been transitioning to new exams by inserting some Common Core-related questions into the ISATs. This spring all questions on ISAT reading and math exams will be related to the Common Core standards, though the format will not be similar to the new field tests.
This will be the last school year for ISATs as well as the 11th-grade Prairie State exam. Still not determined is whether the state will administer the ACT college entrance exam next year. The test has been given annually to juniors as part of the Prairie State for more than a decade. State education officials will discuss that issue at meetings next week.
In Chicago, where the teachers union has called for limiting standardized testing, only a tiny fraction of CPS schools are participating in field testing, state data show.
Statewide, 80 percent of school districts are participating in the field testing, which involves at least one or more of their schools.
“The majority of us want the opportunity to take the … test so that we can see just kind of a first glance, a snapshot of what it’s going to be,” said Gregory Wolcott, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in DuPage’s Woodridge School District 68.
That said, he hopes some students can be exempted from ISATs if they are also field testing the new exams. If students have to take both sets of exams, “that’s an awful lot to put a kid through,” Wolcott said.
The Illinois State Board of Education recently petitioned the U.S. Department of Education for permission to exempt students from ISATs but had not heard back yet. Federal law requires annual state testing.
Even if the federal government grants permission, only students who take two field tests in the same subject will be exempted from ISATs, and only in the comparable subject.
Overall, “all students will still take the ISATs in at least one subject,” said State Board of Education spokeswoman Mary Fergus.
With some students taking ISATs and others not, schools wouldn’t have a complete picture of performance on state exams for 2014. And questions remain on how schools will be judged based on test results.
Many parents still don’t know which tests their children will be taking. School districts say that information will be forthcoming.
In Schaumburg 54, spokeswoman Terri McHugh said the district hopes to get letters out to parents in February.
“It helps us prepare for when we have to administer the test to students next year,” McHugh said. “More importantly, it helps our students become comfortable with the type of testing all Illinois students will take in 2014-15.”
