New tests aim to better grade higher thinking

This week, hundreds of thousands of students across Minnesota will sit down at desks, sharpened No. 2 pencil in hand, for a generations-old ritual: taking standardized tests.

The tests -- made up largely of multiple-choice questions with fill-in-the-bubble score sheets -- have looked mostly the same since the introduction of the IBM Type 805 Test Scoring Machine in 1938.

But as policymakers consider the future of the No Child Left Behind law that mandates these tests, new generations of tests are being developed. Experts say the new tests will be much more effective at measuring things that lawmakers and educators have always lamented that current standardized testing cannot -- higher-order thinking skills, the processes used by students to find their answers and whether students are truly ready for college.

"Those multiple-choice tests were invented for entrance tests into the Army, and we've been using the same kind of basic approach, the same types of questions," said David Heistad, director for research, evaluation and assessment for the Minneapolis School District. "Now, we're finally starting to change."

A step forward in science

The Minnesota science test is one required test being hailed as part of this new era. Delivered via computer to students in fifth grade, eighth grade and high school, it was given for the first time last year, and it aims to do more than just put the paper test online.

The new test is "designed to emulate the lab or the science classroom," said Dirk Mattson, director of assessment and testing at the Minnesota Department of Education. Science education is about knowing how to ask the right questions, and "technology allows us to do this in a much more efficient way."

One challenge, said Michelle Walker, chief accountability officer for the St. Paul schools, is both in the logistics -- such as making sure enough computers are available for students -- and in making sure that some students, such as those still learning English, aren't put at a disadvantage because of the delivery system.

According to Mattson, the Department of Education hopes to put the state's math test online by 2011, when the test is already scheduled for revision. And if lawmakers decide to enact "end-of-course" exams in place of the state's current graduation tests, those will need to be online too, Mattson said, because teachers would need results quickly.

A perfect test?

According to the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test how different student groups fare in school. If one group -- such as special education students -- fails to meet test targets, the whole school is labeled as not making "adequate yearly progress."

By 2014, the law says, every student group in the country is supposed to pass the tests.

That constant push toward testing reading and math has created "an increasing sense that we're leaving out some other skills," said Elena Silva, a policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based education policy think tank. "People felt that higher-order thinking skills, 21st-century skills, were missing."

The sense that some of those skills could never be measured on tests, though, is disappearing.

Silva points to a test given at St. Andrew's School in Delaware, where ninth-graders were given research reports, budgets and other documents from a city, and were told to find ways to manage traffic congestion proposed by population growth.

School districts in Minnesota don't just get information on achievement from state tests, whose results don't arrive until summer. "Formative" tests, which show teachers gaps in student knowledge, and "computer-adaptive tests," which adapt to a student's level after each question, are used frequently to help teachers tailor their teaching to the needs of their students.

For Minnesota's state tests, one major incentive to finding more efficient ways to measure student's reasoning skills is cost. The state's current tests -- the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment - II -- require students to write or to show their work on some questions. It costs $5.5 million for the state to grade those answers every year, which is roughly a quarter of its total assessment budget.

According to Mattson, the perfect test that everybody wants is one that is useful, delivers results quickly, and gets a lot of student achievement information in as few questions as possible.

That's not easy to pull off, Mattson said.

"As one of my staff says, 'That's a Venn diagram, and none of the circles touch.' "