DESE delays ‘adaptive’ MAP tests
A sea change is scheduled to take place this spring with regard to how Missouri public school students in third through eighth grade — including those enrolled in the Maryville R-II School District — take their Missouri Assessment Program examinations.
For the first time at the grade school and middle school level, the mostly multiple-choice exams are to be administered online rather than printed on paper and handed to students to complete at their desks.
Maryville High School students have been taking electronic achievement tests, known as end-of-course exams, since 2010.
But though paper and No. 2 pencils will be replaced by Chromebooks this spring at Maryville Middle School and Eugene Field Elementary, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s blueprint for rolling out e-assessments isn’t going quite the way it was supposed to.
According to a memo sent to public school administrators last month by DESE Assistant Commissioner Sharon Helwig, the department has scrapped plans to provide “adaptive” examinations in spring 2015.
Adaptive e-tests are programmed to change questions based on students’ previous answers. Give a wrong answer, and the questions get easier. Give a right answer, and the questions get harder.
Instead, this year’s MAP exams will be “fixed form,” the same format used for the EOC tests administered at the high school.
Assistant Superintendent Steve Klotz has said that grade school and middle school teachers have been working this year to give their students keyboarding and other skills required to deal with both the new electronic format and what DESE claims will be more rigorous questions and problems.
What won’t change is that, for the last time, all the questions will be the same for everybody.
The Helwig memo stated that the fixed-form Internet-based MAP will be used for this year only, and that “Missouri will complete implementation of computer adaptive testing in the 2015-’16 school year.”
However, Klotz told the R-II School Board earlier this month that DESE hasn’t really said exactly why the switch to adaptive testing is being pushed back.
Helwig’s memo stated only that the delay is meant to “ensure a smooth administration of the new assessment system,” and that the fixed-form tests represent a “step toward full implementation” that will “result in the best product possible for Missouri LEAs.”
LEA is edu-speak for Local Education Authority, a school district, in other words.
Helwig also wrote that going with fixed-form exams should “place less demand on LEA bandwidth.”
The theory behind adaptive testing is that such exams provide more precise scores for most test-takers, especially those at the bottom and top ends of the achievement spectrum.
Proponents also claim that adaptive exams can be shortened by as much as 50 percent and still maintain a higher level of precision than fixed tests because test-takers don’t waste time attempting to answer questions that are either too hard or too easy for them.
Klotz said he is unsure if adaptive examinations will actually take less time to administer. However, like the fixed-form electronic tests to be delivered this year, they will require far less time to grade.
Instead of waiting three months for results after students take the exams this spring, DESE has told districts they can expect scores back before the end of the school year.
Klotz said it will probably take about six weeks to administer electronic MAP tests to all the students at both schools. Hardware and software limitations mean that only so many students can be tested at a time.
Completing the exams takes about the equivalent of a school day for students in third, fourth, sixth and seventh grade, who are tested in English and mathematics. The time frame is somewhat longer for fifth- and eighth-graders who are also tested in science.
