SEA No. 1 Part 3: Indiana Assessment Changes

Welcome back to the Educational Awareness podcast. In this episode we will look at a couple of requirements listed under sections 13 and 14 of Indiana SEA No. 1. These sections cover ILEARN and formative assessments. Many items are not new or alarming, so this will be a quick overview.

                  Section 13-part E states that:

The department shall prepare detailed design specifications for the statewide assessment developed under this chapter that must do the following:

Take into account the academic standards adopted under IC 20-31-3

Include testing of students’ higher level cognitive thinking in each subject area tested.

                  Remember when we had an end-of-year summative assessment that assessed a student’s mastery of their grade levels content? Yes, I am referring to ISTEP. During that time, the test was designed to assess students' mastery of grade level content, leading to an 80-90% passing rate for most schools. Its purpose wasn't to determine if a child possessed higher level cognitive thinking skills. (We have a separate set of tests to assess this.) It was designed to see if the student mastered that grade levels reading and math content.

                  Two things have led to decreased performance on state assessments. One, we moved to state standards that copied the common core standards. These are the standards that require teachers to teach students ten different ways to add numbers. Then, because we moved to these standards, we changed assessments that contained questions aligned to common core standards. Now, we are going to increase the difficulty by assessing students’ higher level cognitive thinking skills.

                  Is this giving us useful data that teachers can use to meet students’ educational needs?

                  Section 14 covers the requirement of formative interim assessments for grades K-8. I refer back to my first episode on SEA No. 1. If we are looking for formative interim assessments that provide valuable data, teachers and parents can use to inform instruction, why don’t we use DIBELS? I would also ask, why can’t we replace the reading ILEARN with DIBELS? It provides timely, actionable data that impacts student learning, unlike ILEARN.

                  Not a lot of alarming items in these two sections. I wanted to point out the assessment piece because I believe we can work together to improve our assessments and data analysis ultimately, leading to better education for students.