Essential Skills Assessment Transition with Smarter Balanced

OverviewThe Essential Skills graduation requirements were adopted by the State Board of Education in 2008. As part of those requirements, the state law pertaining to Essential Skills graduation requirements describes that students must be provided adequate notice (March 1 of the respective 8th grade year) if achievement standards are raised or additional requirements are implemented.

Problem StatementAs Oregon shifts from its current statewide assessment, OAKS, to the Smarter Balanced assessments in English language arts and Math in 2014-15, how will policy makers establish equivalent levels of rigor on the Smarter Balanced assessments relative to the “meets” achievement standards on the OAKS?

OAKS TO SMARTER BALANCED STUDENT DATA LINKING (CONCORDANT VALIDITY)Spring, 2014Approximately 20% of Oregon students will be participating in the Smarter Balanced field test. Summer, 2014 through Fall, 2014Field test data will be used to:

establish the assessment scale evaluate and calibrate the items, and establish performance standards for college and career readiness

First week of December, 2014Student-level field test data will be delivered to states. The format of those data is unclear at this time, although we believe it will include raw student scores and difficulty values for all items that meet technical requirements. Once Oregon has access to those data, we can create a direct link to student performance on the OAKS in order to understand the relationship between scores on the two assessments.

NOTESThe direct linking process is predicated on the assumption that the assessments are measuring similar content in similar ways, producing sufficient evidence of concurrent validity (the degree to which each assessment predicts success on the other).

CONCERNS Variation in constructs between the OAKS and Smarter Balanced

assessments o One test is a largely multiple choice test, while the other

includes multiple choice, short answer (constructed response), and full performance tasks.

o Creates some risk when interpreting direct linking data. The degree to which we can determine a strong relationship in achievement between the two assessments may be limited based on differences in the constructs measured by each.

The direct linking study intended to determine concordance validity will be based on results from one test still in the process of establishing technical quality (data from the Field Test).

At the high school level, student motivation may skew these data, as many students will also be taking the OAKS assessments to meet Essential Skills graduation requirements.

The Smarter Balanced testing window for grade 11 is very late in the school year, meaning some or many students may have already met their graduation requirements and give less than their best effort during Smarter Balanced test administration.

Where all students were given adequate notice of the content standards that are expected (opportunity to learn the Common Core)? (Common Core implementation first required in 2013-2014.) This may not be fully mitigated by the scale linking (equal rigor). It is more of a due process/civil rights issue.

OAKS TO NAEP TO SMARTER BALANCED CUT SCORE LINKING Spring, 2014To validate the direct linking analysis in Reading and Math, we can use previous studies which created a link between NAEP and the OAKS This approach allows us to consider proportions of students meeting various achievement standards on the OAKS relative to NAEP cut scores.

Decision Making TimelineMarch/April 2014 – engage stakeholders and school districts on Essential Skills transition methodological approach, collect feedback, adjust as needed

December 2014 – receive student data from Smarter Balanced, begin linking process and concordance validity analysisJanuary 2015 – brief State Board on initial analysis, risks, next stepsFebruary 2015 – engage stakeholders and school districts on initial analysis, risks, next stepsMarch 2015- State Board first read of Smarter Balanced achievement standards for Essential Skills graduation requirements

April 2015 – State Board adoption of Smarter Balanced achievement standards for Essential Skills graduation requirements

Options for Next Steps1. Maintain current Essential Skills graduation requirements (with the possibility that direct linking

will not work and Essential Skills will need to be suspended in April, 2015)2. Stand up OAKS for 12th grade only (for Essential Skills)3. Revise the Essential Skills graduation requirement policy so that

o (1) Essential Skills proficiency is embedded in the required ELA and mathematics courses and

o (2)students who meet the 11th grade achievement standards on Smarter Balanced benefit from placement test exemption at Oregon post-secondary institutions.