Online Testing — Part 4: Test Will Be Tailored to Each Student’s Academic Abilities
Read other installments in our series on Online Testing.
- Online Testing — Part 1: A New Era for Hawaii Student Assessment
- Online Testing — Part 2: More Chances, Flexibility
- Online Testing — Part 3: Immediate Results
- Online Testing — Part 4: Test Will Be Tailored To Each Student’s Academic Abilities
- Online Testing — Part 5: More Accurate Results
- Online Testing — Part 6: Higher Achievement Standards
- Online Testing — Part 7: Higher Tech, Lower Cost
Until this year, all students in each grade have received the same static set of questions for the Hawaii State Assessment.
One of the most significant changes with the new online assessment is that it will automatically tailor itself to each student’s academic abilities. The technical term for this is “computer-adaptive testing,” and it is the technology the College Board uses for the verbal and mathematical portions of the SAT.
“An adaptive test is designed to be hard to everyone,” said Jon Cohen, director of the assessments program at American Institutes for Research, which designed the items and software for the new assessment.
“Have you ever taken a test where you only get half the items right? The test tries to target the questions right at the student’s ability level, so you’d be right on the borderline of getting every item right.”
Based on how a student responds to each question, the online software will draw from a bank of more than 10,000 unique test items to select the next few questions it has calculated will challenge that student at his or her academic ability. And all within the appropriate grade level.
“When we say adaptive, we’re not testing a fourth-grader on fifth-grade items or third-grade items,” said Cara Tanimura, director of the Hawaii Department of Education Systems Accountability Office. “But you can take a problem and make it as simple or as complex as you want it. So we’re looking at different depths of knowledge, and we make it difficult or easy based on that. It’s very scientific and it’s very complex.”
In a classroom full of students taking the same test, every student could be responding to different questions. But when they are finished, every student’s test is mathematically linked back to the same scale. It’s something you would think could only be done with computers and bleeding-edge technology, but Cohen said the state of Oregon used to have a paper-based adaptive test. Students would answer a few preliminary question that were then scored, and based on their performance they were given one of three tests at different difficulty levels.
“Psychometrically, the tests are all comparable, so the scores are equated,” said Kent Hinton, administrator of the student assessments section of the education department.
Ideally, students will correctly answer about half the questions they receive on the new test, Cohen said.
Because it is more precise in its measurement of student abilities than the former paper-and-pencil assessment, the computer-adaptive adaptive test is also expected to yield results that are more helpful and relevant for teachers and principals.
An in-depth report on every student’s test performance will be delivered to their teachers and principals through an online reporting system. Read more about the reporting system.
