Teach Effectively!

Time graphic

To what extent does a US state’s high-stakes test correspond with a consistent standard assessment? Using data from the Education Trust and the Colorado (US) Department of Education Time magazine’s Feilding Cage (with help from Jackson Dykman) created one of those nifty Flashy things that provides an interactive means of displaying data. The interactive map, linked from the thumbnail shown here, shows the degree to which states’ reading and math assessments differ from the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the standard US metric for achievement.

The results from fewer than 5% of the states’ tests (~2*50) tests are higher than the NAEP. Mostly, it is far easier the NAEP meet standards on the state tests. In the image that I’ve clipped here, one can see that fewer students are judged proficient on South Carolina’s 8th-grade math assessment than on the NAEP. Thus the standard—the NAEP—is more demanding.

To compare across states (i.e., to see where SC’s students stand nationally), one would need to have a consistent measuring stick. The NAEP provides such. States’ high-stakes tests clearly do not.

Because of the way that NAEP scores are developed, this comparison is not based on the scores of the same student on each test, but rather, on an overall comparison. There are lots of technical ins and outs about these comparisons, but the big picture is informative.

I’m attending a meeting of the federal Reading First Advisory Committee and, as serendipity would have it, I stumbled on this article. We were just discussing the problems we’re encountering with not-comparable measures of reading progress across the states; as a result, we’re having a difficult time assessing the effects that Reading First is having on children’s outcomes.

To learn more about the Education Trust, visit the organization’s site. To view another interactive map that allows one to download a detailed comparison of each individual state’s testing, click here. To download a copy of a relevant scholaraly paper from Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation by Bert Stoneberg, look here.

Flash of the electrons to Maya Frost for her post that alerted me to the Time article.