Not long ago, I posted a news story about the problems with Common Core testing in Nashua, New Hampshire, where teachers reported serious flaws with the Smarter Balanced Assessment.
Here is the letter from John Nelson, the principal of Fairgrounds Middle School, which contains details about the problems, as reported by teachers.
FROM: JOHN NELSON
RE: SMARTER BALANCE TEST
This communication is to share the sentiment of the FMS staff as it relates to the Smarter Balance Test. As you know, our staff used the December Early Release to take this test with the goal that it would provide us with some insight how we might incorporate the “common core” and the format of the Smarter Balance Test into our instructional practices. We believe that we successfully incorporated the NECAP Test format and GLEs into our teaching practices, especially in our “Bell Activities. “
Although a few staff members shared that they believed that our test scores would improve over time, I was surprised with the responses from the FMS teachers when we gathered to debrief after taking the test. I was hopeful that we would have teachers sharing test vocabulary, ideas for test taking, and strategies to help prepare our students for the 2015 Smarter Balance Test. Instead, teachers shared frustrations they had when they were taking the test and disappointment in test format and the difficulties they had trying to use their computer to take this test.
The comments shared below come from successful dedicated veteran teachers. I have much respect for this staff and I not only appreciated the honesty of the staff in their response to the Smarter Balance Test; but, I am hopeful that the Nashua School District will accept these responses in a positive way and not look at the comments as “negative” or “unprofessional”. The FMS staff collectively believe that the Smarter Balance Test is inappropriate for our students at this time and that the results from this test will not measure the academic achievement of our students; but will be a test of computer skills and students’ abilities to endure through a cumbersome task.
Listed below are some of the concerns that were shared by our staff:
*I feel sad for the students who have to take this test — not many will be successful.
*Much is said about “depersonalizing” information as part of a learning strategy. This is not how students learn.
*There is too much “stuff” going on the screen at once. It is difficult to move the icons where you want them. Students don’t know how to use the “mouse” everything for them is “tough screen”.
If you leave the screen for a short period of time the information on the screen will be gone when you return. “I tried the grade six-grade math—it was humbling. It was scary.
*I had technology problems. If kids have these problems they’ll just quit.
*Double-wide monitors would help. I am a huge fan of concept maps but notepad does not let you do that on Smarter Balance. You can’t even copand paste from the notepad into the test.
*This was more of a test on the computer skills than on the math concepts. If I was a student I would just pickout an answer and move on.
*Too tedious—kids will get sick of it and just guess to move on. Kids won’t even get past the computer directions.
These are just a sample of the concerns that were raised at this meeting. We did shift to “what do we have to do from now until the spring of 2015 to prepare students. Sample answers include:
*Pay attention to the directions. Provide students with many opportunities to read directions for their assignments.
*You can’t just read this test and then respond. Students need to highlight and take notes—especially during the audio questions.
*Students need to learn to “read the question first”.
*Students need to be able to go back into the text passages to pull out data that will support their answers.
*Students need to read through the questions and all possible answers. Sometimes questions give the answers to other questions in the test.
*Kids need to know how to do “note taking”.
*We need to teach students “how to draw an inference”.
*Students need to learn how to write a transition sentence between two paragraphs.
*Students need to learn how to write using “the speakers” voice.
*Students need to memorize formulas in this test.
*Students will have difficulty writing in the boxes that expand because of the technology of the way the box expands.
*Students will have trouble reading and understanding the directions and what is being asked by the question. Is this test closely aligned to the “common core?” It is important that teachers know what the test will be assessing.
*I am concerned that the math test is not necessarily testing students’ math abilities since there is so much reading. This test seems to assess how well the students read the math questions more than their math skills. Thus, because of the amount of reading, I question the validity of our receiving a math ability score.
*When Measured Progress developed the NECAP there was a committee on bias to check for testing bias. Does Smarter Balance do the same? Also, math teachers were asked to evaluate the questions to eliminate unnecessary verbiage so that the Math was being tested.
*The opening pages of directions and computer information was ridiculous. I didn’t read it—I’m sure my students won’t. Suggestions: We should have posters made of the most important and often used keys to post in each math classroom. Students need to practice making equations in Word, including the fractions symbol. We need to teach students to distinguish between on correct answer and many correct answers. There are questions that tell the students to choose the correct answers.
*The test is difficult to navigate with so many keystrokes to juggle.
*The page layout makes it eye weary even though you can expand the screen and zoom in and out.
*The passages are lengthy and time consuming and made me consider just choosing “B” so I could move on. Some terms in the reading seemed out-dated—“Plumb crazy and millwright” for example.
I had to use multiple skills and at the same time multitask—id—the audio portions require me to listen and at the same time read possible answers while constructing a well written paragraph in my head.
*The test assumes the students are skilled in such areas as pre-reading and questions and if they are not, it assumes they will learn while taking the test to read the questions in advance of the reading.
*There wasn’t a flow or cadence to the questions. The type or style of questions changed from one to the next. The answers were not straight forward—for example on the math test they did not want the answer to the equation, they wanted to know if the answer was 2/3rd greater than what you started with. I understand this is import ant but this test will be exhausting for the kids.
*The idea of the best answer and then there being 2 or more good and appropriate answers. It felt like a trick. We’re going to look bad for a few years.
*I did 30 questions in an hour and then had to take a break. My eyes hurt and my shoulders felt strained. When I returned 5 minutes later the work was gone.
*Each question is totally different than the one before it creating confusion which creates more confusion for the test takers.
*Frustration level builds as your take the test creating mental despair—students will shut down.
Many of the math questions seemed to have no basis in the real world and skills that will never be used in life. Students will need to be taught the technology skills for the test.—scrolling through screens, highlighting, scanning the questions, touch typing, and more.
*The test does not encourage students to use writing webs, brain maps, organizers to assist with writing. Summary: In my opinion, this test is a sad indictment of how disconnected the people who design the test are from the typical students in the classroom. Assessment is necessary but it should be designed to be developmentally appropriate for the students being tested. Assessment should also all for different methods to demonstrate competency rather than one computer model. This test is designed for one type of student—the verbal learner with exceptional executive functioning skills.
*I took the Grade 7 Language Arts test which I believe is developmentally designed for adults, not seventh grade students. The questions were tedious and punitive. I’m not sure that any seventh grader in the St ate would be able to score well on this test. The worst part of this test was the directions. They were numerous and multifaceted. After observing middle school students take tests for over a decade, it is my firm belief that most kids will stop reading the directions because there are too many and they are far too complex. Students will fail this test and the test will destroy their confidence which is an important stage of their development. In addition, the results of this test will become a public relations night mare for the school and the school districts as children will fail in large numbers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Effing amazing. This was a seventh grade test? I was guessing Middle School to early High School from the comments.
Toyota has a rule that they don’t do anything on a computer until they can do it on paper. It sounds like this test would benefit from that rule.
“Praise the lord and Halllelujah!!!” Another convert to anti-testing coalition!!!
NOT-in a 30 font.
Took a “close reading” to figure out to whom this letter is addressed.
“This communication. . . ‘Bell Activities’.”
So this school gets to see the test in advance while the majority don’t? Thought this was supposed to be a “standardized” test. This principal is playing the “raise the test scores” game. GAGAers, principal and staff, through and through, the 21st level awaits thee.
In that paragraph: “how we might incorporate the “common core” and the format of the Smarter Balance Test into our instructional practices.” NO, the CCSS are not federally mandated curriculum. . . and I’ve got some great ocean front property over at Lake of the Ozarks in central MO for sale cheaply.
“Although a few . . . had trying to use their computer to take this test.”
“I was surprised with the responses from the FMS teachers when we gathered to debrief after taking the test.” Gotta love that militaristic “debriefing” aspect of this crap. Debriefing means to tell the administrator that everything was hunky dory and the test was just great. Oh no, what happened, the test is a piece of $h!t and even adults can’t figure it out. Not that that makes a difference.
We need to “have teachers sharing test vocabulary, ideas for test taking, and strategies to help prepare our students for the 2015 Smarter Balance Test.” That’s right you “need” to do the wrong thing better, smarter, righter so that you can become all the more wronger, maybe even the wrongest school around.
“. . . disappointment in test format and the difficulties they had. . . ” Nothing said about the complete invalidity of the whole process and that any and all results are as Wilson states “vain and illusory”, duendes, a chimera and to use the results for anything is to perpetuate falsehoods, lies and absurdity. John, read and understand Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
“The comments shared. . . through a cumbersome task.”
“. . . successful dedicated veteran teachers.” They may be all of that but they are GAGAers nonetheless.
“. . I’m hopeful that the NSD will accept these response in a positive way. . . ”
Obsequious to the point of making me want to puke. How much more servile, ingratiating, sycophantic, fawning, unctuous, oily, oleaginous, groveling, cringing, subservient, submissive, slavish could this principal be??? Grow some cojones and stand up for what is right by the children. And that standing up for what is right for the children has nothing to do with implementing CCSS and the accompanying standardized tests.
The banality of evil needs it perfunctory toadies to exist.
What would you have them do, Duane? In what danger are you of losing your job? How close to retirement are you? How does the testing affect your teaching? I have a feeling that there are plenty of teachers and administrators downplaying the import of these tests while trying to stay employed. It seems to me that this principal and the teachers are trying to reinstate some sanity into this process.
These are TRAPS not TESTS. They are written to TRICK, CONFUSE, and WEAR DOWN the test taker. All part of the GRAND PALN to prove that America’s public school are failing.
Sorry, but Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, David Colemen, and Michelle Rhee HAVE FAILED at putting togrther a cogent, cohesive, and developmentally appropriate set of learning standards and companion tests. I wrote items for NECAP and trust me, this crap wouldn’t have gotten past the trash can at Measured Progress.
The purpose of this test or all the other assembly line generated tests is not to evaluate Math or any other subject – it is to create exactly what kids and teachers experienced. The EdReform movement is some sadistic payback for some pathological vindication for people in power. Sick! Sick! Sick!
The examples can be added to the thousands of examples of Piss-Poor test items, technology skills not taught or used throughout the year, tech skills not age appropriate for children, glitches upon glitches.
What a Joke… But, it is not funny one bit!
I TRIPPLE DARE ALL Legislators and PoliSci Majors ‘Non-Education Experts’ to take all these Junk Tests and post their scores publicly.
What, no takers? Of course not!
It has never been about our children, learning or improving education.
“In addition, the results of this test will become a public relations night mare for the school and the school districts as children will fail in large numbers.”
All according to plan. Heh, heh, heh.
If the kids are pushed too hard and are deprived of normal life than this is what happens:
A 15-years old student shoots his teacher and a police officer
What this articles does not tell but you can get it from Russian sources that the student Sergey Gordeyev, was a “perfect A-student” who suddenly got a “B” from his geography teacher, and so he felt the teacher must be ‘punished’. And the shooting took place at a school with STEM emphasis, where the daily load of homework was enormous starting from K. His daily schedule was packed with homework alone, he had no life outside of homework, tests and grades. His parents believed that he must be a PERFECT boy and did not want him to have any grades other than A-s. His parents also made him memorize the whole Bible by heart, as that was a part of their idea of a PERFECT boy.
And “perfect” boy he was until his unsuspecting geography teacher dared to give him a “B” for one of his minor assignments. This created a disconnect in a perfect paradise of a perfect-robot boys brain. The disturber had to be eliminated. Since the boy’s modern and perfect parents had the weapons readily available at home, this was not a hard task for a perfect boy, rather a science exploration experiment – you know those things in Bible he had to memorize…
NY times did not publish the whole truth. Why not?
I hope someone gives this story a fair review. Because this whole testing thing and the crazy homework, and how the kids suffered emotionally in NY this year due to Common Core tests…. The outcome will be sad. Better learn from other people’s experience.
From the posting: “*The idea of the best answer and then there being 2 or more good and appropriate answers. It felt like a trick. We’re going to look bad for a few years.”
I wish I were surprised that an apparently experienced and caring principal didn’t recognize the stock-in-trade of high-stakes standardized testing.
But don’t think we weren’t forewarned well in advance.
From Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 edition of the 1964 edition of the 1962 original, p. 69-70):
[start quote]
It is not without significance that the professional testers refer to the “wrong” answers as “distractors,” “misleads,” and “decoys.” The decoys are deliberately designed to seem plausible. They are, in fact, deliberate traps. Were they always traps baited with definitely spurious bait one might tolerate them, even though their presence gives the test an air of trickery and deception that is not altogether becoming. But too often the traps are baited unfairly. For it is difficult to draw a sharp line between legitimate wile and illegitimate deceit, and the temptation to trespass on the shadowy no-man’s-land between the two is hard to resist. (Harder, even, than the temptation to change metaphors in mid-argument.)
Purely factual questions can be made difficult by merely using obscure, unimportant facts. Making genuinely difficult multiple-choice questions by other means is far from easy, and, under pressure to produce many hard questions, the test-makers tend to succumb to the lure of ambiguity.
[end quote]
With all due respect, although inelegantly phrased, the principal and the staff at FMS now know what it’s like to be sucker punched.
I applaud them for speaking out. That is a good first step.
😎
1) Which term to test writers use to identify any one of the three incorrect repsonses on a standard multiple choice test?
a) key
b) distractor
c) refrigerator
d) stem
In this sample tets item, the corrct answer (key) is (b) distractor
Options (a) and (d) are considred plausible distractors because they are the names of other parts of an MC item.
Option (c) is not a plausible distractor because it it a preposterous or silly option that changes it into a 3 option test item.
A well written MC item should not be disparaged.
When are people going to figure out that multiple-choice tests are generally TERRIBLE vehicles for testing vaguely formulated, abstract skills (like those in the CC$$ for ELA) or for any purpose beyond testing specific, concrete content or procedural knowledge (recall tasks)? Yes, it is POSSIBLE to test higher-level thinking skills via multiple-choice questions, but it’s fiendishly difficult to do that at all well, as our current crop of high-stakes tests abundantly demonstrate by their failure to do so.
I’ve reviewed hundreds and hundreds of these high-stakes tests over the years. In most cases, hand me the state high-stakes test, and I will be able to show you many examples of multiple-choice questions in which the stem and/or choices were so poorly written that
1. none of the choices is actually correct;
2. a choice intended by the test designer to be incorrect is actually correct, and the choice intended by the test designer to be correct is actually incorrect;
3. more than one answer is actually correct;
4. no proposition that can be assigned a truth value (correct or incorrect) can be legitimately formed from the stem plus any of the choices. (In other words, any combination would result in a statement that is neither true nor false but absurd or meaningless.)
As test creators try to ramp up their game and make the distracters (or distractors–both spellings are widely used) more plausible (and so to make their tests more rigorous, to use the Rheformish word translatable into standard English as “unnecessarily difficult and confusing”), they end up producing increasing numbers of questions that fall into one of the above-mentioned categories, and it becomes an ever-more amusing game to go through their tests and point out where the test maker, not the student, failed, even after (in the case of PARCC and SBAC) spending many millions of taxpayer dollars and ungodly amounts of editorial time on the development. I say that pointing out the problems in the tests can be an amusing diversion. However, when one remembers that high-stakes decisions will be made on the basis of these tests, one’s amusement soon turns to annoyance and then to rage.
Rheformish–the dialect spoken by those attempting the current education Rheformation–is remarkable for its abstraction and vagueness. All Rheformish commentary about the Rheforms is done from the 50,000-foot perspective: Schools are failing! No excuses! Higher standards! You get what you measure! Blah blah blah blah. But the devil is in the details. And the Rheformers have intentionally created NO MECHANISMS WHATSOEVER for exorcising those devils that so numerously infect specific standards, specific test questions, specific teacher evaluation criteria, etc.
NB: There seems to be debate among field linguists with regard to the proper term for referring to this latest dialect of Goblish. Should we speak of Reformish, Rheformish, Rheeformish, Deformish, Dephormish, Rephormish, or Rhephormish? My choice of Rheformish rests on an aesthetic rather than a philological principle. “Rheformish” just strikes me as pleasingly appropriate because it is almost standard and thus close to reasonable but actually completely wacked, as the Gospel of the Education Rheformation–the Revelation to Achieve–itself is. Many thanks to those brave linguists who have subjected themselves to unspeakable suffering in data chats and other Rheformist venues to collect data for the ongoing Rheformish Lexicon Project! Mastery of the tongue is, of course, essential to the ongoing effort to repel the invasion of our schools by the Rheformers.
Long live the Counter-Rheformation!
Thank you Robert for your exceptional explanation.
I have added Rheformish to my vocabulary. My auto correct is having conniptions.
It is totally crazy to expect even the sharpest, most test-prepped students to “pass” a poorly designed, deceptive test that college-educated, seasoned teachers cannot understand, complete, or navigate on a computer, assuming the computers work.
That’s the BEST description I’ve read yet!!!
I mentioned opting out to my daughter and she asked how to go about it. No sense in having my grand daughter get another 1 on these trickeries.
Today the NEA-NH threw the teachers under the bus.
They came out AGAINST a moratorium on testing in NH. http://nhfamiliesforeducation.org/content/nh-board-education-chairman-and-nea-nh-president-mislead-house-education-committee
These union heads get WAY too cozy with the politicians in their states. So since they campaigned and worked hard to get the Governor elected, they will continue to protect her. AT the expense of teachers in NH.
Political power of the NEA-NH is more important. That was made clear today
From the Rheformish Lexicon:
union. n. universal scapegoat. See, however, NEA.
NEA. n. Propaganda ministry of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, or MiniTru (Archaic usage: association dedicated to protection of the rights and interests of teachers; a teachers’ labor union)
OH for anyone in NH, there is a facebook page: Stop Common Core In New Hampshire. OR contact NH Families for Education and join us in the fight against Common Core. Clearly the NEA-NH will not fight for teachers.
When these new tests are rolled out nationwide, that’s when the villagers will grab their pitchforks and shovels and track the Education Deform monster to its lair.
I agree.