Areas of Celebration and Exploration

After a brief interlude, it’s time to get back to the blog series I started recently about analyzing assessments.

• In the first post, I shared the importance of digging into the questions, not just the standards they’re correlated to.
• In the second post, I talked about how understanding how a test is designed can help us better understand the results we get.
• In the third post, I shared how I learned to organize assessment data by item difficulty and the implications for supporting our students.
• In this post, I’d like to talk about another way to look at assessment data to uncover areas of celebration and areas of exploration.

Let’s get started!

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In my previous post I shared the order of questions based on item difficulty for the 2018 5th grade STAAR for the entire state of Texas. Here it is again:

According to this ordering, question 9 was the most difficult item on the test, followed by question 18, question 8, and so on down to question 10 as the least difficult item (tied with questions 2 and 4).

Here’s my question: What is the likelihood that any given campus across the state would have the exact same order if they analyzed the item difficulty just for their students?

Hopefully you’re like me and you’re thinking, “Not very likely.” Let’s check to see. Here’s the item difficulty of the state of Texas compared to the item difficulty at just one campus with about 80 students. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Some of my noticings:

• Questions 8, 9, 18, and 21 were some of the most difficult items for both the state and for this particular campus.
• Question 5 was not particular difficulty for the state of Texas as a whole (it’s about midway down the list), but it was surprisingly difficult for this particular campus.
• Question 22 was one of the most difficult items for the state of Texas as a whole, but it was not particularly difficult for this campus (it’s almost halfway down the list).
• Questions 1, 2, 10, 25, and 36 were some of the least difficult items for both the state and for this particular campus.
• Question 4 was tied with questions 2 and 10 for being the least difficult item for the state, but for this particular campus it didn’t crack the top 5 list of least difficult items.
• There were more questions tied for being the most difficult items for the state and more questions tied for being the least difficult items for this particular campus.

My takeaway?

What is difficult for the state as a whole might not be difficult for the students at a particular school. Likewise, what is not very difficult for the state as a whole might have been more difficult than expected for the students at a particular school.

But is there an easier way to identify these differences than looking at an item on one list and then hunting it down on the second list? There is!

This image shows the item difficult rank for each question for Texas and for the campus. The final column shows the difference between these rankings.

 

Just in case you’re having trouble making sense of it, let’s just look at question 9.

As you can see, this was the number 1 most difficult item for the state of Texas, but it was number 3 on the same list for this campus. As a result, the rank difference is 2 because this question was 2 questions less difficult for the campus. However that’s a pretty small difference, which I interpret to mean that this question was generally about as difficult for this campus as it was for the state as a whole. What I’m curious about and interested in finding are the notable differences.

Let’s look at another example, question 5.

This is interesting! This question was number 18 in the item difficulty for Texas, where 1 is the most difficult and 36 is the least difficult. However, this same question was number 5 in the list of questions for the campus. The rank difference is -13 because this questions was 13 questions more difficult for the campus. That’s a huge difference! I call questions like this areas of exploration. These questions are worth exploring because they buck the trend. If instruction at the campus were like the rest of Texas, this question should have been just as difficult for the campus than for the rest of the state…but it wasn’t. That’s a big red flag that I want to start digging to uncover why this question was so much more difficult. There are lots of reasons this could be the case, such as:

• It includes a model the teachers never introduced their students to.
• Teacher(s) at the campus didn’t know how to teach this particular concept well.
• The question included terminology the students hadn’t been exposed to.
• Teacher(s) at the campus skipped this content for one reason or another, or they quickly glossed over it.

In case you’re curious, here’s question 5 so you can see for yourself. Since you weren’t at the school that got this data, your guesses are even more hypothetical than there’s, but it is interesting to wonder.

Let me be clear. Exploring this question isn’t about placing blame. It’s about uncovering, learning what can be learned, and making a plan for future instruction so students at this campus hopefully don’t find questions like this so difficult in the future.

Let’s look at one more question from the rank order list, question 22.

This is sort of the reverse of the previous question. Question 7 was much more difficult for the state as a whole than it was for this campus. So much so that it was 7 questions less difficult for this campus than it was for the state. Whereas question 5 is an area of exploration, I consider question 7 an area of celebration! Something going on at that campus made it so that this particular question was a lot less difficult for the students there.

• Maybe the teachers taught that unit really well and student understanding was solid.
• Maybe the students had encountered some problems very similar to question 7.
• Maybe students were very familiar with the context of the problem.
• Maybe the teachers were especially comfortable with the content from this question.

Again, in case you’re curious, here’s question 22 to get you wondering.

 

In Texas this is called a griddable question. Rather than being multiple choice, students have to grid their answer like this on their answer sheet:

Griddable items are usually some of the most difficult items on STAAR because of their demand for accuracy. That makes it even more interesting that this item was less difficult at this particular campus.

We can never know exactly why a question was significantly more or less difficult at a particular campus, but analyzing and comparing the rank orders of item difficulty does bring to the surface unexpected, and sometimes tantalizing, differences that are well worth exploring and celebrating.

Just this week I met with teams at a campus in my district to go over their own campus rank order data compared to our district data. They very quickly generated thoughtful hypotheses about why certain questions were more difficult and others were less so based on their memories of last year’s instruction. In meeting with their 5th grade team, for example, we were surprised to find that many of the questions that were much more difficult for their students involved incorrect answers that were most likely caused by calculation errors, especially if decimals were involved. That was very eye opening and got us brainstorming ideas of what we can work on together this year.

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This post wraps up my series on analyzing assessment data. I might follow up with some posts specifically about the 2018 STAAR for grades 3-5 to share my analysis of questions from those assessments. At this point, however, I’ve shared the big lessons I’ve learned about how to look at assessments in new ways, particularly with regards to test design and item difficulty.

Before I go, I owe a big thank you to Dr. David Osman, Director of Research and Evaluation at Round Rock ISD, for his help and support with this work. And I also want to thank you for reading. I hope you’ve come away with some new ideas you can try in your own work!

Crystal Capture

This weekend I made something fun and wanted to share it in case it provides fun for anyone else.

My daughter has a board game called Unicorn Glitterluck.

Daddy: How many extra cloud crystals did you have?
Me: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. pic.twitter.com/G15QTjWfMH

— Splash (@SplashSpeaks) April 1, 2018

It’s super cute, but not the most engrossing game. She and I especially like the purple cloud crystals, so this weekend I started brainstorming a math game I could make for us to play together. I know number combinations is an important idea she’ll be working on in 1st grade, so I thought about how to build a game around that while also incorporating the crystals.

Introducing…Crystal Capture!

Play testing "Crystal Capture" a new game I made up using crystals @SplashSpeaks has from another game. 2, 3, 11, and 12 have one space with 3 crystals each. 4, 5, 9, and 10 have 2 spaces with 2 crystals each. 6, 7, and 8 have 3 spaces with 1 crystal each. #tmwyk pic.twitter.com/YWFyEGPAWu

— Brian Bushart (@bstockus) September 8, 2018

Knowing that certain totals have greater probabilities of appearing than others, I created a game board that takes advantage of this. Totals like 6, 7, and 8 get rolled fairly frequently, so those spaces only get 1 crystal each. Totals like 2, 3, 11, and 12, on the other hand, have less chance of being rolled, so I only put 1 space above each of these numbers, but that space has 3 crystals.

I mocked up a game board and we did a little play testing. I quickly learned a few things:

I originally thought we would play until the board was cleared. Everything was going so well until all we had left was the one space above 12. We spent a good 15 minutes rolling and re-rolling. We just couldn’t roll a 12!! That was getting boring fast which led me to introduce a special move when you roll a double. That at least gave us something to do while we waited to finally roll a 12.

That evening I made a fancier game board in Powerpoint and we played the game again this morning:

Second iteration of Crystal Capture was much more fun than version 1. I also mocked up a game board in Powerpoint. @SplashSpeaks approves! #tmwyk pic.twitter.com/Nvcu5Uh0Te

— Brian Bushart (@bstockus) September 9, 2018

Since clearing the board can potentially take a long time, which sucks the life out of the game, I changed the end condition. Now, if all nine of the spaces above 6, 7, and 8 are empty, the game ends. Since these numbers get rolled more frequently, the game has a much greater chance of ending without dragging on too long.

I did keep the special move when you roll doubles though. This adds a little strategic element. When you roll a double, you can replenish the crystals in any one space on the board. Will you refill a space above 6, 7, or 8 to keep the game going just a little bit longer? Or will you replenish one of the three-crystal spaces in hopes of rolling that number and claiming the crystals for yourself?

All in all, my daughter and I had a good time playing the game, and I learned a lot about where she’s at in her thinking about number combinations. Some observations:

• She is very comfortable using her fingers to find totals.
• Even though she knows each hand has 5 fingers, she’ll still count all 5 fingers one-at-a-time about 75% of the time.
• She is pretty comfortable with most of her doubles. She knows double 5 is 10, for example. She gets confused whether double 3 or double 4 is 8. We rarely rolled double 6, so I have no idea what she knows about that one.
• In the context of this game at least, she is not thinking about counting on from the larger number…yet. She doesn’t have a repertoire of strategies to help her even if she did stop and analyze the two dice. If she sees 1 and 5, she’ll put 1 finger up on one hand and 5 on the other, then she’ll count all.
• I did see hints of some combinations slowly sinking in. That’s one benefit to dice games like this. As students continue to roll the same combinations over and over, they’ll start to internalize them.

Several folks on Twitter expressed interest in the game, so I wanted to write up this post and share the materials in case anyone out there wants to play it with their own children or students.

• Crystal Capture Directions
• Crystal Capture Game Board

You’ll have to scrounge up your own crystals to put in the spaces, but even if you don’t have fancy purple ones like we do, small objects like buttons, along with a little imagination, work just as well. Oh, and if you can get your hands on sparkly dice, that helps, too. My daughter loves the sparkly dice I found in a bag of dice I had lying around.

Have fun!

Difficult

This post is the third in a series where I’m sharing how I’ve changed the ways that I look at assessments and assessment data.

• In the first post, I shared the importance of digging into the questions, not just the standards they’re correlated to.
• In the second post, I talked about how understanding how a test is designed can help us better understand the results we get.
• In this post, I’d like to share one of the ways I’ve learned how to analyze assessment results.

Let’s get started!

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Do you know what the most difficult item on an assessment is?

• Is it the one with a pictograph with a scaled interval that involves combining the values from several categories?
• Is it the multi-step story problem involving addition, subtraction, and multiplication?
• Is it the one about matching a set of disorganized data with the correct dot plot out of four possible answer choices?

Here’s the thing I learned from Dr. Kevin Barlow, Executive Director of Research and Accountability in Arlington ISD, no matter how much time and effort someone spends designing an item, from crafting the wording to choosing just the right numbers, the only way to determine the difficulty of an item is to put it in front of students on an assessment. After students are finished, take a look at the results and find the question where the most students were incorrect.

You found it! That’s the most difficult item on the assessment.

Through their responses, our students will tell us every single time which question(s) were the most difficult for them. It’s our responsibility to analyze those questions to determine what made them so challenging.

Fortunately, the Texas Education Agency provides this information to us in Statewide Item Analysis Reports. Unfortunately, it starts out looking like this:

This is a great first step, but it’s not terribly useful in this format. You can’t glance at it and pick out anything meaningful. However, if I copy this data into a spreadsheet and sort it, it becomes so much more useful and meaningful:

Now I’ve sorted the questions based on how students performed, from the item most students answered incorrectly (#9 was the most difficult item on this test) to the item the least number of students answered incorrectly (#2, #4, and #10 were tied for being the least difficult items on this test). It’s interesting to think that #9 and #10, back to back, turned out to be the least and most difficult for 5th graders across the state of Texas!

The items highlighted in red were the most difficult items for 5th graders. Remember, it doesn’t matter how the questions were designed. These items were the most difficult because the least number of students answered them correctly.

The items highlighted in blue, on the other hand, were the least difficult items for 5th graders in Texas. I’m intentional about calling them the least difficult items. We might be inclined to call them the easiest items, but that obscures the fact that these questions were still difficult enough that 14-17% of all Texas 5th graders answered them incorrectly. To put some real numbers with that, anywhere from 56,000 to 68,000 students answered these “easy” items incorrectly. These items were clearly difficult for these students, but they were the least difficult for the population of 5th graders as a whole.

Now what?

We might be inclined to go to the items in red and start analyzing those first. Great idea! But for whom?

Well, since they were the most difficult items, meaning the most students missed them, we should use these items to teach all of our students, right? Clearly everyone had issues with them!

I’m going to disagree with that.

These items were difficult even for some of our strongest students. If they struggled, then the last thing I want to do is bring this level of challenge to all of my students, especially those who struggled throughout the test. Rather, I’ll analyze the most difficult items to get ideas to provide challenge to my higher performing students. These kinds of questions are clearly structured in a way that gets them thinking, challenges them, and perhaps even confuses them. That’s good information to know!

(Please don’t misinterpret this as me saying that I don’t want to challenge all students. Rather, I want to ensure all students are appropriately challenged, and that’s what I’m trying to identify through this kind of analysis. Read on to see what I mean.)

But what about students who struggled throughout the test? For those students, I’m going to analyze the least difficult items. In this case, 14-17% of students in Texas answered even these items incorrectly. These items posed a challenge for quite a number of students, and I want to analyze the items to figure out what made them challenging for these students.

Let’s pretend that this is school data instead of Texas data, and let’s pretend we’re a team of 6th grade teachers analyzing 5th grade data for our 200 6th graders. That would mean at least 28-34 students in our 6th grade did not do well on these least difficult items when they took 5th grade STAAR last spring. That’s a pretty significant number of kids! They could for sure benefit from some form of intervention based on what we learn from analyzing these items.

And that’s where I’m going to leave this in your hands! Here is a document where I’ve collected the most difficult and least difficult items from the 2018 5th grade STAAR. These are the actual test questions along with the percentage of students who selected each answer choice. Spend a little time analyzing them. Here are some questions to guide you:

• What are the features of each question? (How is the question constructed? What are its components and how are they put together in the question?)
• Why do you suppose the features of a given question made it more/less difficult for students?
• What mathematical knowledge and skills are required to be successful with each question?
• What non-mathematical knowledge and skills are required to be successful with each question?
• What can you learn from analyzing the distractors? What do they tell you about the kinds of mistakes students made or the misunderstandings they might have had?
• What lessons can we learn from these questions to guide us in how we support our students? (We don’t want to teach our students these exact questions. That’s not terribly useful since they won’t be taking this exact test again. Rather, seek out general themes or trends that you observe in the questions that can guide your classroom instruction and/or intervention.)

I’ve opened up the document so that anyone can comment. If you’d like to share your thoughts on any of the questions, please do! I look forward to reading your thoughts about the least and most difficult items on the 2018 5th grade STAAR.

I’m giving you a very small set of questions to analyze right now. You may or may not be able to generalize much from them depending on your own experiences analyzing assessment items. However, it’s worth doing regardless of your experience, because now the repertoire of items you’ve analyzed will be that much larger.

As for myself, I’ve been analyzing assessment items like this for several years. What I’d like to do in my next post is share some of the lessons I’ve learned from this analysis across multiple years. I do feel like there are consistent trends (and a few surprises) that can inform our work in ways that simultaneously align with high-quality math instruction (because ultimately this is what I care much more about than testing) while also ensuring students are given the supports they need to succeed on mandatory high stakes tests (because they are a fact of life and it’s our responsibility to ensure students, especially those who are relying on school for this support, are prepared for them).

 

 

By Design

(Note: This post is a follow up to my previous post, Misplaced Priorities.)

When you teach a unit on, say, multiplication, what are you hoping your students will score on an end-of-unit assessment? If you’re like me, you’re probably hoping that most, if not all, of your students will score between 90% and 100%. Considering all the backward designing, the intentional lesson planning, and the re-teaching and support provided to students, it’s not unreasonable to expect that everyone should succeed on that final assessment, right?

So what message does it send to teachers and parents in Texas that STAAR has the following passing rates as an end-of-year assessment?

• 3rd grade – Students only need to score 50% to pass
• 4th grade – Students only need to score 50% to pass
• 5th grade – Students only need to score approximately 47% to pass

Wow! We’ve got really low expectations for Texas students! They can earn an F and still pass the test. How terrible!

Comments like this are what I often hear from teachers, parents, administrators, and other curriculum specialists. I used to believe the same thing and echo these sentiments myself, but not anymore.

Last year, our district’s Teaching & Learning department attended a provocative session hosted by Dr. Kevin Barlow, Executive Director of Research and Accountability in Arlington ISD. He challenged our assumptions about how we interpret passing standards and changed the way I analyze assessments, including STAAR.

The first thing he challenged is this grading scheme as the universal default in schools:

• A = 90% and up
• B = 80-89%
• C = 70-79%
• D = 60-69%
• F = Below 60%

The question he posed to us is, “Who decided 70% is passing? Where did that come from?” He admitted that he’s looked into it, and yet he hasn’t found any evidence for why 70% is the universal benchmark for passing in schools. According to Dr. Barlow, percentages are relative to a given situation and our desired outcome(s):

• Let’s say you’re evaluating an airline pilot. What percentage of flights would you expect the pilot to land safely to be considered a good pilot? Hopefully something in the high 90s like 99.99%!
• Let’s say you’re evaluating a baseball player. What percentage of pitches would you expect a batter to successfully hit to be considered a great baseball player? According to current MLB batting stats, we’re looking at around 34%.

It’s all relative.

Let’s say you’re a 5th grade teacher and your goal, according to state standards, is to ensure your students can multiply up to a three-digit number by a two-digit number. And here’s the assessment you’ve been given for your students to take. How many questions on this assessment would you expect your students to answer correctly to meet the goal you have for them?

1. 2 × 3
2. 8 × 4
3. 23 × 5
4. 59 × 37
5. 481 × 26
6. 195 × 148
7. 2,843 × 183
8. 7,395 × 6,929
9. 23,948 × 8,321
10. 93,872 × 93,842

If my students could answer questions 1 through 5 correctly, I would say they’ve met the goal. They have demonstrated they can multiply up to a three-digit number by a two-digit number.

1. 2 × 3 (Meets my goal)
2. 8 × 4 (Meets my goal)
3. 23 × 5 (Meets my goal)
4. 59 × 37 (Meets my goal)
5. 481 × 26 (Meets my goal)
6. 195 × 148 (Beyond my goal)
7. 2,843 × 183 (Beyond my goal)
8. 7,395 × 6,929 (Beyond my goal)
9. 23,948 × 8,321 (Beyond my goal)
10. 93,872 × 93,842 (Beyond my goal)

Questions 6 through 10 might be possible for some of my students, but I wouldn’t want to require students to get those questions correct. As a result, my passing rate on this assessment is only 50%. Shouldn’t I think that’s terrible? Isn’t 70% the magic number for passing? But given the assessment, I’m perfectly happy with saying 50% is passing. Expecting an arbitrary 70% on this assessment would mean expecting students to demonstrate proficiency above grade level. That’s not fair to my students.

Some of you might be thinking, “I would never give my students this assessment because questions 6 through 10 are a waste of time because they’re above grade level.” In that case, your assessment might look like this instead:

1. 2 × 3
2. 8 × 4
3. 23 × 5
4. 59 × 37
5. 481 × 26

It hasn’t changed the expectation of what students have to do to demonstrate proficiency, and yet, to pass this assessment, I would expect students to earn a score of 100%, rather than 50%. Again, I would be unhappy with the arbitrary passing standard of 70%. That would mean it’s okay for students to miss questions that I think they should be able to answer. On this assessment, requiring a score of 100% makes sense because I would expect 5th graders to get all of these problems correct. If they don’t, then they aren’t meeting the goal I’ve set for them.

So why not just give the second assessment where students should all earn 100%? If that’s the expectation, then why bother with the extra questions?

This is exactly the issue going on with STAAR and its perceived low passing rate.

When you have an assessment where 100% of students can answer 100% of the questions correctly, all you learn is that everyone can get all the questions right. It masks the fact that some students actually know more than their peers. In terms of uncovering what our learners actually know, it’s just not very useful data.

More useful (and interesting) is an assessment where we can tell who knows more (or less) and by how much.

STAAR is designed to do this. The assessment is constructed in such a way that we can differentiate between learners to get a better sense of what they know relative to one another. In order to do this, however, it requires constructing an assessment similar to that 10-item multiplication assessment.

Just like how questions 1 through 5 on the multiplication assessment were aligned with the goal for multiplication in 5th grade, about half the questions on STAAR (16 or 17 questions, depending on the grade level) are aligned with Texas’ base level expectations of what students in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade should be able to do. That half of the assessment is what we expect all of our students to answer correctly, just like we would expect all 5th graders to answer questions 1 through 5 correctly on the 10-item multiplication assessment.

So how do Texas students fare in reality? Here are the numbers of students at each grade level who answered at least half of the questions correctly on STAAR in spring 2018:

• Grade 3 – 77% passed with at least half the question correct (299,275 students out of 386,467 total students)
• Grade 4 – 78% passed with at least half the questions correct (308,760 students out of 397,924 total students)
• Grade 5 – 84% passed with about half of the questions correct (337,891 students out of 400,664 total students)

Not bad! More than three quarters of the students at each grade level demonstrated that they can answer at least half of the questions correctly. These students are meeting, if not exceeding, the base level expectations of their respective grade levels. (Side note: Texas actually says students earning a 50% are Approaching grade level and a higher percentage is called Meets grade level. I’m not going to play with the semantics here. For all intents and purposes, earning a 50% means a student has passed regardless of what you want to call it.) But we’re left with some questions:

• How many of these roughly 300,000 students at each grade level performed just barely above the base level expectations?
• How deep is any given student’s understanding?
• How many of these students exhibited mastery of all the content assessed?

Good news! Because of how the assessment is designed, we have another set of 16 or 17 questions to help us differentiate further among the nearly 300,000 students at each grade level who passed. This other half of the questions on STAAR incrementally ramps up the difficulty beyond that base level of understanding. The more questions students get correct beyond that first half of the assessment, the better we’re able to distinguish not only who knows more but also by how much.

Since percents are relative and 70% is our culturally accepted passing standard, why isn’t the STAAR designed to use that passing standard instead? It would definitely remove the criticisms people have about how students in Texas pass with an F.

Here are two rough draft graphs I created to attempt to illustrate the issue. Both graphs represent the 3rd grade STAAR which has a total of 32 questions. The top graph is showing a hypothetical passing standard of 70% and the bottom graph is showing the actual passing standard of 50%

The first graph represents a 3rd grade STAAR where 70% is designed to be the passing standard. This means 22 questions are needed to represent the base level of understanding (assuming this assessment also has a total of 32 items). Since we’re not changing the level of understanding required to pass, presumably 300,000 students would pass this version of the assessment as well. That leaves only 10 questions to help us differentiate among those 300,000 students who passed to see by how much they’ve exceeded the base level. That’s not a lot of wiggle room.

The second graph represents the current 3rd grade STAAR where 50% is designed to be the passing standard. This means 16 questions are needed to represent the base level of understanding, but now we have another 16 questions to help us differentiate among the 300,000 students who passed. Because there are a number of high performing students in our state, this still won’t let us differentiate completely, but there’s definitely more room for it with the 50% passing standard than the 70% passing standard.

Some points I want to make clear at this point in the post:

• There are definitely issues with an assessment where half of it is by design more difficult than the expectations of the grade level. We have roughly a quarter of students in Texas who can’t even answer the base level questions correctly (half the assessment). Unfortunately, they’re subjected to the full assessment and the base level questions are interspersed throughout. There are a lot of issues around working memory, motivation, and identity that could be considered and discussed here. That’s not what I’m trying to do in this post, however. As I mentioned in my previous post, regardless of how I feel, this is the reality for our teachers and students. I want to understand that reality as best I can because I still have to live and work in it. I can simultaneously try to effect changes around it, but at the end of the day my job requires supporting the teachers and students in my district with STAAR as it is currently designed.
• STAAR is trying to provide a mechanism for differentiating among students…in general. However, having analyzed this data at the campus level (and thanks to the expertise of my colleague Dr. David Osman) it’s clear that STAAR is too difficult for some campuses and too easy for other campuses. In those extremes, it’s not helping those campuses differentiate very well because too many students are either getting questions wrong or right.
• This post is specifically about how STAAR is designed. I can’t make any claims about assessments in other states. However, I hope this post might inspire you to dig more deeply into how your state assessment is constructed.
• I’m not trying to claim that every assessment should be designed this way. I’m sharing what I learned specifically about how STAAR is designed. Teachers and school districts have to make their own decisions about how they want to design their unit assessments and benchmark assessments based around their own goals.

In my next post I’m going to dive into the ways I’ve been analyzing assessment data differently this past year. I wanted to write this post first because this information I learned from Dr. Barlow has completely re-framed how I think about STAAR. I no longer believe that the 50% passing rate is a sign that we have low expectations for Texas students. Rather, STAAR is an assessment that is designed to not only tell us who has met grade level expectations, but also by how much many of our students have exceeded them. With that in mind, we can start to look at our data in interesting and productive ways.

Misplaced Priorities

Every spring thousands upon thousands of Texas students take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR for short). It’s a one-day snapshot meant to evaluate a year of learning within a subject area. Even though many disagree with one-time events as assessments of learning, the fact of the matter is that they are a reality for us and our students. Because these assessments carry so much weight, we pore over the data they generate, often looking for standards where our students performed poorly so we can identify what to focus on in our instruction and intervention.

But what if I told you this well-intentioned practice may be sending us in unproductive directions? Rather than focusing on what our students really need, we may be spending time on topics and/or skills that are not the priority.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a story. I was working with a 4th grade team after a district benchmark we call STAAR Ready. Every spring in my district we give our students a released STAAR to gauge readiness for the actual STAAR coming up in May. Afterward, teams analyze the data to determine which topics to revisit and which students to put into intervention groups.

As I met with this 4th grade team, they showed me a list of the low-performing TEKS (Side note: this is what we call our standards in Texas – the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, TEKS for short) they had identified after analyzing the STAAR Ready data. One of the TEKS jumped out at me immediately because I was familiar with the test:

TEKS 4.4A add and subtract whole numbers and decimals to the hundredths place using the standard algorithm;

I asked them to tell me more, and the team told me they had identified students who performed poorly on the questions correlated to this standard. They created an intervention group with these students to work on adding and subtracting whole numbers and decimals to make sure they could do these computations accurately.

I followed up with a question, “Have you looked at the actual questions correlated to these TEKS?” Because they were looking at so much data and so many standards, they hadn’t gotten back into the test. Instead they’d just been identifying high-priority TEKS based on student performance on the questions.

I pulled up the test and showed them this question that had immediately come to mind when they told me they were making a group focused on TEKS 4.4A:

Source: Texas Education Agency, STAAR Math, Grade 4, Item 34

Take a moment and analyze the question.

• Can you see how it involves adding and/or subtracting with whole numbers and/or decimals?
• But what other skills are involved in answering this question correctly?
• What features of the problem might have made it more difficult for the students to answer correctly?

As it turns out, this was an incredibly difficult problem for students! When it was given to students on the actual STAAR in spring 2016, only 43% of students across the state of Texas were able to answer correctly. That means 57% of Texas 4th graders, or roughly 209,390 students, couldn’t find the total cost of three items in a shopping basket. That’s…concerning.

In my own school district, we used the 2016 released STAAR as our STAAR Ready in spring 2017. This allowed me to collect data Texas doesn’t make available to everyone. When we gave the test in spring 2017, the problem was nearly as difficult for our students. About 48% of students in my district answered it correctly. I was also able to determine this was the 6th most difficult item on the entire test of 48 questions!

What’s going on? A lot actually, for such a short question. For starters, key information is spread across two sentences. The first sentence of the problem indicates the quantities of items purchased – 1 hat and 2 skirts. The second sentence indicates their prices. This is subtle, but separating that information across two sentences upped the level of difficulty significantly for 9 and 10 year olds. Students who are not reading closely can quickly jump to the conclusion that they only need to add the two prices shown without realizing that one of those prices needs to be used twice.

The second feature of this problem that ups the difficulty is the fact that it is an open response question, not multiple choice. On this kind of question, a student’s answer has to be absolutely 100% accurate. If they’re off by even 1 penny, the answer is marked wrong. No pressure, kids!

I was curious which feature made the problem more difficult for the students in my district, so I dove into the data. One thing I had available that Texas doesn’t release is the actual answers every student submitted for this problem. I was able to analyze roughly 3,600 answers to see what students were doing. Here’s what I found out.

While only 48% of students got this question correct, there was a chunk of students whose answers were in the ballpark. These are kids who likely made a small calculation error. Unfortunately, if I calculate the percent of students who got it right or reasonably close, that only brings it up to 51% of our 4th graders. That’s not terribly impressive.

So what was everyone else doing? Here’s where it gets interesting. I predicted that these students only found the cost of 1 hat and 1 skirt, and it turns out that’s exactly what 33% of students in my district did. Nearly 1,200 students failed to comprehend that the total cost is composed of a hat, a skirt, and another skirt.

Going back to the team I was working with, I asked, “So now that we’ve analyzed this question, do you think the issue is that your students are struggling with adding and subtracting whole numbers and decimals?” We talked about it and they agreed that the bigger issue is how their students read and comprehend word problems.

Looking just at the standards is a very limiting view of analyzing data. There are often many different ways to assess a standard, and if we don’t take the time to look at the exact questions our students interact with, we might be missing critical information. Had this team done an intervention on pure addition and subtraction of whole numbers and decimals their kids would have gotten better at those skills for sure. But is that really what they needed?

Over the past year, I’ve been analyzing assessment data differently than in the past. In follow up posts I’d like to share some of that with you. In the meantime, please dive into your assessments and analyze those questions, not just the standards. You’ll hopefully come away with a truer picture of what’s challenging your students so that you can more accurately target with what and how to support them.