As a classroom teacher who has participated in such efforts at both the state and national levels, I would like to share some insights.
I have a strong interest in student assessments and state testing. In 2008, after 14 years
in the classroom, I joined the Ohio Department of Education’s Rangefinding Committee to provide input on tests related to third-grade reading.
Rangefinding requires educators to review written responses from students’ field tests and determine the score each response would receive within the framework of a rubric.
This process intrigued me, as it gave me the opportunity to see how students across our state performed on actual test questions. It also allowed me, as a classroom teacher, to have a real influence on how evaluators would score each of these questions.
This past April, I was asked to share my rangefinding expertise with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) English Language Arts/Literacy Rangefinding Committee in Arizona. Because I knew Ohio had adopted PARCC assessments as a means of measuring student progress starting in 2014‐15, I jumped at the chance. The opportunity would allow me to collaborate with educators from states within the PARCC Consortium to establish precedents for future test items.
PARCC assessments, which are aligned with Common Core standards, are designed to provide parents, students and educators with actionable and timely feedback about individual student progress. These tests are developed with input from educators like myself to measure students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and to assess their ability to communicate clearly. They also help determine whether students are on track to be successful in college and careers.
The committee I worked on included educators from states including Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and, of course, Ohio. Other groups included representatives from different states. Our committee was charged with evaluating third-grade students’ written responses to questions from field tests to identify where they fell within a specific scoring rubric. We also evaluated the scoring rubric and recommended modifications to that rubric based on the range of responses we received.
The overall rangefinding process was time consuming. After reading questions from these tests and evaluating students’ written responses, our group identified some that wholly hit the mark and others that indicated a lack of understanding of the question.
We also found some that partially addressed the subject, and had to determine how to score these examples.
This work was challenging: just imagine gathering a team of people from different states, backgrounds, and school districts, and expecting them to have the same opinion.
Each of us knew how our own state would view particular answers to test questions, however, and through in‐depth discussions and analysis, we were able to reach consensus as to what we, as part of the PARCC Consortium, would expect as a response to a prompt.
Because the decisions we made as a group affected other grade-level committees, our work impacted the entire rangefinding process. It was rewarding to see how our contributions evolved into the tools — called training sets — that would be used by the people who score students’ responses.
My involvement in both the Ohio Department of Education and PARCC Rangefinding Committees is representative of the impact educators have in shaping these tests. From question development to the evaluation and scoring of student responses, as well as the development of training materials for scorers, teacher involvement in such projects is critical and helps ensure that the interests of our state, region and school district are represented.
Brian Shimko is a fourth-grade teacher at Beavercreek’s Trebein Elementary who has served on both the Ohio Department of Education’s Rangefinding Committee for third-grade reading, plus the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) English Language Arts/Literacy Rangefinding Committee. He also served as a summer school principal for the Beavercreek City School District in 2014.
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