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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

The new online Hawaii State Assessment will give teachers more in-depth and accurate reports on their students so they can better customize classroom time.

An in-depth report on how each student performed on every part of the new test will be delivered to his or her teachers, principals, complex area superintendents — all the way up to Hawaii Department of Education Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi herself — through an online reporting system.

What The System Can Tell Teachers

The new test is computer-adaptive, which means it tailors itself to each student’s unique abilities based on previous responses.

The reporting system taps into the sensitivity of that adaptive test by describing more than just which questions students have answered correctly and incorrectly. Even though students will still respond to the same number of items, the amount of data teachers will receive from those answers is about to increase exponentially.

“It’s very powerful,” said Cara Tanimura, director of the department’s Systems Accountability Office. “This provides the teacher with a lot more information about the students in the classroom. We do want the system to talk, and we do want for people to have a complete picture of students’ achievement and their work.”

Civil Beat got a sneak preview of what the system will look like during a meeting with the Tanimura and Jon Cohen, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which developed the both the new online assessment and the former paper test. Cohen walked us through the features that Superintendent Matayoshi would see.

Each educator has access to reports on all the students under his or her authority. For example, teachers see the assessment results only for their own students. But a complex area superintendent sees results for all the complexes, schools, classrooms and students under his or her jurisdiction.

When Matayoshi logs into the reporting system, her home page will display a statistical summary of how all Hawaii public school students have performed on the state assessment. A teacher’s dashboard will show a statistical summary for his or her students.

Matayoshi will have the capability to view more specifics at every level within the school system, all the way down to each individual student report if she wants to. But the system is designed to force educators to see broad trends before they begin aimlessly drilling down into the specifics, Cohen said.

“We want people to look at the data, to think about the data, then ask questions and then follow those questions through the data,” he explained.

The data exist in three major interrelated reporting categories:

Who: This is the level of aggregation. Data can be viewed from the combined district level down through complexes, complex areas and schools to the individual student level. Teachers, principals or superintendents can also create custom rosters of students.

What: This is the content of the assessment. Data can be viewed from the broad subject area (e.g. math) down through sub-disciplines (e.g. algebra) to specific skills (e.g. graphing a line from coordinates).

When: This is the point in time, or history of the data. Teachers, principals and superintendents will be able to view long-term trends and point-in-time data at every level on the other two categories.

Teachers will also be able to see whether a student or group of students is doing better or worse on certain topics in the test than they are on the test as a whole.

A handy navigation widget in the dashboard allows teachers to navigate through the data with ease. All of the statistics can be configured to show what a supervisor or teacher wants to see.

Each student has an overall report for each subject, and then more specific data inside that report — and these can be printed off to share in parent-teacher conferences.

Tailored Teaching Based On Test Scores

This comprehensive reporting system, paired with a flexible testing window, will make it easier for teachers to be nimble and adjust classroom instruction throughout the year to their students’ needs.

For example, if a teacher feels a subset of her students could easily pass the reading portion of the assessment early in the year, she can go ahead administer it to only those students, allowing them to move forward with more advanced curriculum once she sees they have reached proficiency on the test. They can be placed on a special roster so they don’t have to take the assessment again later that year.

But if that same teacher sees from the assessment scores that several of her students are struggling with reading comprehension, she can place them in their own reporting roster and focus on improving those skills with them in her classroom work. They may then be in a special group that takes the assessment a third time when all their classmates achieved proficiency earlier.

“One of the things about the paper test is, there’s a lot of emphasis on the end-of-year testing event,” Cohen said. “There are a bunch of kids who are going to be proficient sometime early in the year. But because you’re not getting any feedback on anybody until the end of the year, everybody gets the same content — instruction is differentiated less and you’re focused on teaching just these grade-level standards.”

“By removing the anxiety that goes with wondering if you’re going to make (federal benchmarks) by the end of the year, you free up everyone involved in the process to take kids at the top further,” he said. “And it gives you the ability to hone in on what you need to teach the kids at the bottom.”