Two Naperville area school districts are showing they’re prepared for whatever techinical problems students might face while taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam this week.
While neighboring Oswego District 308 experienced technical difficulties this week, Indian Prairie District 204 and Naperville District 203 are proceeding as planned with the all-online test, known as PARCC.
Mary Fergus, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Education, estimated that 75 percent of students in Illinois were scheduled to take the test online where as 25 percent will use the paper/pencil version.
She said the results don’t matter whether PARCC is taken online or paper/pencil. “Schools do not necessarily select one or the other,” Fergus said. “Some classes may administer a paper version of the test while others make take the test online. There is a lot of flexibility within our administration of the test.”
Fergus said the goal is to get all schools in the state online.
Both Districts 203 and District 204 have been onboard with the online version from the start, and in the past few years both districts honed their computer infrastructure and planned contingencies so the PARCC test could be administered with few problems. So far the hard work seems to be paying off.
Patrick Nolten, District 204’s executive director of research and assessment, said while individual schools have reported a few glitches, “we’re not having broad, catastrophic issues like other districts,” he said. “It’s not the Hindenburg. It’s not the Titanic.”
Nolten said the biggest problem were computers freezing up during the test. He said the staff just swaps out the problem laptop and the student continues where he or she left off because the work is saved in the system.
Some technical issues are expected when embarking on a new test involving 14,000 to 15,000 District 204 students the first week, according to Nolten. He added 98 percent of the tests were administered via wireless Internet, which held up fine.
Roughly half the students in District 204’s 21 elementary schools (grades 3 to 5), all the students in the seven middle schools (grades 6 to 8), and designated students at the high school level will take the PARCC throughout March. Another round of testing is scheduled in late April and early May.
Nolten said Illinois schools have known about what would become the PARCC exam for four years. District 204 embraced the challenge and started buying laptops and expanding the bandwidth two to three years ago in preparation.
In addition to improving the computer infrastructure, District 204 provided 8 to 10 hours of professional development for the people who trained individual teachers and participated in field testing.
District 203 did much of the same, and also is not seeing any catastrophic issues either.
The biggest challenge was to get parents to feel comfortable with the test’s administration, said Michelle Fregoso, District 203 director of communications.
She said numerous informational meetings were held in previous months and literature was sent home and posted online explaining the importance of the test. Parents were asked to encourage their children to familiarize themselves with sample tests at school and at home and make sure the children get plenty of sleep the night before and eat a good breakfast to start their day.
Parents also had the option to speak with staff to discuss specific concerns about PARCC testing.
Fregoso said opt-outs are not allowed by the state, so all students will be taking the test in District 203. “If a student is absent for a PARCC test session during the scheduled testing days, he/she will be assigned to a make-up session,” she said. “If he student is also absent for the make-up session, he/she will be coded as absent for the state assessment in the State of Illinois Student Information System.”
All District 204 students are given the chance to participate in PARCC testing, according to Nolten. “We can’t force anyone to take the test,” he said. “We just present them with a computer and the opportunity to test. What they do with their time after that is up to them.”
Nolten said over the years, parents of a handful of the district’s roughly 30,000 students have told their children not to participate in assessment testing, whether it be the Illinois Standards Achievement Test or the Prairie State. He expects the trend to continue with PARCC, adding there’s not been a groundswell of opposition to the new test.
subaker@tribpub.com
