Saying it’s seeking to comply with a state mandate to propose ways to reduce testing, the New York State Education Department wants to increase a type of testing that reacts more swiftly to performance.
While reducing the number of tests or the amount of time spent testing is possible, New York State Education Department Senior Deputy Commissioner for Education Policy Ken Wagner on Monday told the New York State Board of Regents that technology could transform tests.
“We could reduce testing time next year, absolutely. But there would be trade-offs,” Wagner told the Board at its Albany meeting. “If we wanted to maintain reading and writing and problem solving, we would have to cut something to make the test shorter.”
Wagner, a former school psychologist and principal at Long Island schools, has been the state’s top ranking education official since Commissioner John King resigned to join the Obama Administration.
The budget requires the chancellor of the Board of Regents to submit a test reduction report to the governor and legislature by June 1.
That includes ways to reduce the amount of state and local testing, improve test quality and minimize test preparation and student stress.
Wagner made his proposal for transforming testing as part of a slide show given to the Board of Regents titled “Testing Reduction Report” with the slogan, “Our students. Their moment.”
Wagner recommended convening an advisory group of experts and stakeholders regarding the next generation of state assessments.
He then said the state would like to have tests better measure students’ skills, but that many of these skills were difficult and time consuming to measure in standardized tests.
“The reason why this is a particular challenge is some of those goals are directly opposite each other,” Wagner said.
He in a 15-minute presentation said the state should include performance-based tasks that “look more like the kinds of learning that we value in our classrooms.”
“The problem is those tasks, reading and writing and problem solving, take more time,” he said, indicating that including these elements would add time.
Instead of outlining a strategy to reduce the number of overall tests, Wagner then proposed more “adaptive testing” in which computers would be used rather than paper.
“Adaptive testing has its challenges,” Wagner said. “But the gist of adaptive testing is the test responds to the pattern of student responses.”
If a student starts to get questions wrong, the adaptive test, which is tailored to the student, provides easier questions and tests that could end sooner. If the student gets questions right, it provides more difficult questions.
“One challenge is they’re administered online,” Wagner said. “That means you need a mature technology infrastructure.”
The $2 billion smart schools bond act will provide schools with funds to buy tablets and computers and improve broadband. He said that could facilitate these tests, but the state currently can’t do this for all schools.
“It’s probably true we’re not there,” Wagner continued regarding any plan to “bring adaptive testing to scale.”
Other problems with high-tech, high-stakes tests include the fact that the state would need to assemble more questions, to “have a wide pool of items, to pull items for each person.”
“You need a bigger item pool than you would need for traditional tests that administer all the same items to all the students,” he said.
Wagner noted that the federal government currently refuses to accept these tests as meeting its mandates, although he sounded hopeful of seeing that change at some point.
The federal government, he said, requires “the same assessments administered to all students and that they be grade level.
“Adaptive testing, particularly as it adapts to the unique needs of the test taker, could very quickly veer to be off grade level,” he said.
Students could face questions for higher grades or lower grades, although he said they’re already being given questions that don’t match grade level to better measure their skills.
“Some of that happens already in our current test,” Wagner, who was trained as a school psychologist, said. “But adaptive testing would do that in a much more detailed way.”
Although he was never a teacher, Wagner has a long history as a school administrator on Long Island.
He is a former program administrator for Eastern Suffolk BOCES who also worked as director of administrative services and middle school principal at the Shoreham-Wading River Central School District.
Wagner also served as interim assistant principal in the Roslyn school district and a school psychologist in Freeport.
He has a PhD in clinical school psychology and a B.A. in psychology and philosophy from Hofstra University, where he graduated with a 4.0 average.
