Assessing the PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and ACT Aspire Tests

In this Education Gadfly article, Morton Polikoff (University of Southern California) reports on the Thomas B. Fordham’s study of how well the Grade 5-8 PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and ACT Aspire tests measure Common Core standards. “A key hope for these new tests was that they would overcome the weaknesses of the previous generation of state assessments,” says Polikoff. “Among those weaknesses were poor alignment with the standards they were designed to assess and low overall levels of cognitive demand… There was widespread belief that these features of NCLB-era state tests sent teachers conflicting messages about what to teach, undermining the standards and leading to undesirable instructional responses.” 

More than 30 content-area experts were brought in to evaluate the three new tests – and also the Massachusetts MCAS, widely acknowledged as the best of previous-generation state assessments. The conclusions in brief (see below for a link to the full study):

• Overall, reviewers concluded that each of the tests is high-quality and successfully measures student mastery of Common Core and other college- and career-ready standards.

• The PARCC and Smarter Balanced are better in several ways, especially in English language arts. 

• The English language arts PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests are well matched to the Common Core criteria, have much more cognitively demanding tasks than the other two tests, and have a superior match to Common Core in coverage of research and vocabulary/ language. Students are required to write open-ended responses drawing on an analysis of one or more text passages, whereas MCAS writing passages don’t require textual analysis and writing is assessed in only a few grades. 

• In math, the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests are better focused on the “major work of the grade” than either MCAS or (especially) ACT. The cognitive demand exceeds that of prior state tests – and reviewers believe ACT items are too demanding relative to standards. Item quality was judged to be generally excellent, though a few items on Smarter Balanced tests have mathematical or editorial issues.

“Going forward,” Polikoff concludes, “the new tests – and states deploying them – would benefit from additional analyses… We need more evidence about the quality of these new tests, whether focused on their content (as in our study) or their technical properties. It is my hope that, over time, the market for state tests will reward the programs that have done the best job of aligning with the new standards.”

“New Common Core Assessments Measure the Most Important Content in the Standards” by Morton Polikoff in The Education Gadfly, February 17, 2016 (Vol. 16, #7), http://bit.ly/1Q762Xc; the full report is available at http://bit.ly/1QuzQfy.  

From the Marshall Memo #625