At the start of this school year, when Delaware launched its new standardized tests—and tougher grading standards—state and local officials started preparing parents and the public for bad news.
The word went out: Standards for demonstrating proficiency on the exams had been raised. Parents and the public should expect that the percentage of students testing as “proficient” on the new Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System (DCAS) would be 10 to 28 points lower than with the Delaware State Testing Program (DSTP), which was in use until last year.
As it turns out, Delaware students might be exceeding the lowered expectations.
“Based on the first snapshot that we have, students by and large did much better than we expected on this first round of tests. We were pleasantly surprised. More students approached or tested at proficient than we expected,” says Michael Stetter, the DOE’s director of accountability resources. “And as teachers hone their instruction based on their students’ test results, we expect those scores to go up throughout the year.”
Results from the first round of DCAS exams were made available to schools and parents online within 48 hours of testing. But the state does not plan to release any test results publicly until July, when it will issue an end-of-year summary report.
In each round of assessments, students are being tested on the same knowledge—what they are expected to have mastered by the end of that school year. So, a fifth-grade student is not expected to test proficient at the fifth-grade level in October, but is expected to by May.
About 97 percent of eligible students in Delaware took the first round of DCAS tests in math and reading between October 11 and November 19. A second round of testing runs from early January through April 11. A final round will close out the school year.
The computer-based DCAS replaces the pencil-and-paper DSTP assessments, which had been used for the past decade in the state’s public schools. Administered annually in March, the DSTPs served primarily to track student achievement for school accountability under the federal No Child Left Behind law. DCAS still will be used for that purpose; but the exams also give teachers feedback to track students’ progress throughout the year.
This year all public school students in grades 3 through 10 will undergo three rounds of testing in reading and math. Beginning next year, schools have the option of adding in a fourth testing cycle. Science and social studies tests will continue to be given only at the end of the school year.
“The benefit of DCAS is that by testing students three times throughout the school year, we can see and track growth in a student, and teachers receive the results quickly enough to actually help the child,” says Sixth District Representative Debra Heffernan (D), a former president of the Brandywine School Board.
Fifth-grade teachers at Brick Mill Elementary School in Middletown are beginning to look over the results they received from the second rounding of DCAS testing, which ended today. “From what we are seeing, students are progressing more in the area of reading than math—at least in our classrooms,” says teacher Dana Patton.
DCAS data will help Patton and her fellow teachers to pinpoint specific areas in which students need additional math instruction. Fifth-grade math scores, for example, are broken down into four major subject areas: numeric, algebraic, geometric, and quantitative reasoning. The data is broken down even further, identifying specific skills that students need help with, such as probabilities or algebraic symbols.
“This is still so new for all of us—a new way of testing, a new reporting system—but it really is beneficial to be able to assess at the beginning and middle of the year as well as at the end,” Patton says.
DCAS, like its predecessor, aligns with Delaware content standards. Some of the multiple choice and short-answer questions on DCAS were pulled directly from DSTP tests. Other questions were developed through collaboration between DOE and the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the DCAS vendor. The DCAS testing system is adaptive—that is, the sequence of questions is unique to each student.
“This is not an off-the-shelf test but one that was built based on what we expect Delaware students to know,” Stetter says.
AIR received a five-year, $24.6 million state contract to develop and administer the tests. DCAS was part of Governor Jack Markell’s education reform plan and was financed with state and federal funds, according to the DOE.
Along with the change in testing systems, the Delaware Board of Education adopted higher proficiency standards for students in reading, math, science and social studies. The goal was to more closely align with results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and provide a better benchmark for comparing Delaware students with those in other states.
For example, while 76 percent of fourth graders tested proficient on the 2010 DSTP test, the DOE had expected that about 48 percent would test proficient on the 2011 DCAS. That 48 percent is still above the 35 percent of Delaware fourth graders considered proficient in 2009 by NAEP standards. The cutoff points for meeting proficiency standards will undergo reevaluation after the final round of testing this spring and will be readjusted if necessary, according to James Herzog, education associate at DOE.
“We wanted to have a test that provided us with nationally referenced data. Parents and teachers both wanted that,” notes state Senator Liane Sorensen (R-Hockessin), a member of the Senate Education Committee. “We also wanted the tests to be diagnostic so teachers could see where the children stood, where they needed help.”
“The DCAS assessment is another good piece of information to tie in with the other information we get through regular in-class assessments and, just as important, what we are seeing on a daily basis,” says Trevor Little, who teaches fifth grade at Baltz Elementary School in the Red Clay Consolidated School District.
Little says he is looking forward to receiving results from the mid-year assessments. “We will be able to see what growth has been made, what areas still need work, and what trends are being shown in the data for needs and growth,” he says.
For districts and schools, implementing the new assessment system presented some initial challenges—setting up new computers, finding appropriate testing locations, scheduling the exams.
“Logistically it takes some scheduling talent. It takes several weeks to get through the testing with all three grades in our school,” said LouAnn Hudson, principal of Millsboro Middle School. “We’ve also kept a lot of communication going back and forth between school and home so that students and parents would know what to expect.”
For students and teachers in the Brandywine School District, computer-based assessments were not new. In addition to taking the state-mandated DSTP, Brandywine students were taking the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) Measures of Academic Performance test three times a year for the past five years. They abandoned those tests this year to switch to DCAS.
Brandywine’s major hurdle will be to help teachers understand and use the data provided by the new assessments. “DCAS assessment will eventually provide the same sort of instructional resources that NWEA did for us,” says Brandywine District Superintendent Mark Holodick. “It’s a matter of teachers getting comfortable with it and learning the tools. The potential is there, but we are not there yet.” Holodick says he anticipates that by next year all the kinks of transitioning testing systems will be worked out.
Teachers throughout the state received pre-test training and continue to receive training on the reporting system and using that data in the classroom.
