Read other installments in our series on Online Testing.

Paper, booklets, lab kits, shipping back and forth, hand-grading — all costly (and time-consuming!) hallmarks of annual students assessments. But no longer, for Hawaii. They are now things of the past.

The new online assessment means not only more useful results, more flexibility and higher standards, but it also means lower costs.

Within the next three years, the Hawaii Department of Education will be spending about $5.5 million per year on its Hawaii State Assessment — almost half of what it paid last year. And the online test will also save school principals an estimated $1.5 million each year by rendering separate quarterly assessments unnecessary. (Learn more in our story about how the test increases flexibility during the school year

That will relieve a lot of the financial burden on the Systems Accountability Office, said its director, Cara Tanimura.

“It will reduce the stress quite a bit,” she said. “And we can use the money we save for the instructional needs of the students and for the support they will need to be successful.”

The new assessment is less expensive in part because it does not involve the artifacts mentioned earlier, and also because it combines what were formerly two separate tests: The HSA and the Hawaiian Aligned Portfolio Assessment (HAPA). The HAPA is the HSA equivalent for students enrolled in the state’s Hawaiian Language Immersion Program. It was developed separately from the HSA and scored entirely by humans, but the two were developed in conjunction for the state’s new online assessment. And both tests will be automatically scored electronically.

Even though the tests were distinct before, from now on they will be the same test. The new test will be administered in both Hawaiian and English.

“Most of the HSA items are written in English and translated into Hawaiian,” said Jon Cohen, vice president for the American Institutes for Research, which developed the former paper HSA and the new online assessments. “But some of the items are going to be written originally in the Hawaiian language by Hawaiian speakers and then translated back into English and used in the HSA. The items are going to be just like the HAPA was: all written to the state content standards.”

Other savings come from not having to order special test booklets for students with disabilities. The online assessment software is adaptable to almost every student’s needs. For example, those with trouble seeing can make the print larger with just a few clicks of the mouse.

“I’m thrilled that we’ll have a better test, we’ll spend less and the money can be used for the students in the classrooms,” Tanimura said.

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