October 30, 2003
Districts’ response to testing may fail already-struggling students
High-stakes tests are having the wrong effect on many of the K-12 students who need the most help, according to two scholars in Washington state.
Sheila Valencia, a professor in the UW’s College of Education, and Marsha Riddle Buly, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, looked closely at students who failed Washington state’s fourth-grade reading assessment and found that students failed the test for a wide range of reasons.
Some failures, they say, raise questions about the test itself, but the problem they identified isn’t with tests. The problem, Valencia says, comes when school districts address failures on standardized tests with an equally standardized instructional approach.
“People are trying to put into place instructional programs that they think will help low-achieving kids,” Valencia said. “They’re making the assumption that all kids who failed to meet a standard need the same kind of instruction — if you fail, you should get this kind of program. We think that’s problematic.”
Riddle Buly, who recently earned her doctorate at the UW, and Valencia found that the low test scores masked more complex problems having to do with word identification (reading the words), fluency (reading quickly, accurately and with expression) and meaning (understanding words and longer reading selections). Treating all students who fail a test the same, as is happening in some school districts across the nation in response to failures on standardized tests, misses the individual instructional needs of students.
“The short answer is, they don’t all fail for the same reasons,” Valencia said.
For example, some of the students they examined displayed the word-identification skills of a ninth-grader, yet they couldn’t pass the fourth-grade reading assessment. A uniform approach, intended to help these students reach the standard, might emphasize word identification and wouldn’t help these students. Instead, they would need instruction focusing on meaning.
Standardized tests and state tests, the researchers say, simply can’t take into account important differences among students. Students whose primary language is something other than English, for example, might have a grasp of basic vocabulary, but they haven’t necessarily developed the deeper understandings necessary to thrive in an academic subject.
The best approach, Riddle Buly and Valencia say, is to rely on a teacher who understands the strengths and needs of each student.
“A knowledgeable teacher is invaluable,” Riddle Buly said. “This study provides further evidence that a knowledgeable teacher is the most powerful way to improve learning for each student.”
But the duo doesn’t want to eliminate tests as one part of accountability. In fact, they say the tests can be valuable tools when the purpose is understood and when they’re used as part of a thorough educational plan. “Any standardized test, or any assessment, provides one snapshot of a student. To know the student we must have multiple snapshots, acquired through multiple forms of assessment, primarily the assessment that thoughtful and knowledgeable teachers do in the classroom on a regular basis,” Riddle Buly said.
Valencia agreed. “I think the tests help us do a first layer of assessment, but too often we stop at the first layer,” she said. “What would be more informative is to ask questions instead of drawing conclusions. I’d suggest asking what do we know about these children who failed and what do we know about their reading skills. Basically, we should use their failure as an opportunity to dig beneath the scores rather than looking at the scores and saying, ‘All right, here’s our plan of action.’ ”
The research, which served as the basis for Riddle Buly’s dissertation, was published last fall in the journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. A copy of the article is available online at http://depts.washington.edu/ctpmail/PDFs/Reading-MRBSV-04-2003.pdf.
