It is testing season in British Columbia. As thousands of students are being subjected to the BC’s Foundation Skills Assessment, ICES co-director Sandra Mathison has offered up alternatives to the much-maligned test.
Vancouver Sun (January 16, 2013)
B.C. need not rely on the much-maligned FSA tests to gauge students’ skills
As schools prepare to give the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) tests next week, it may be the last time they are administered, at least in their current form.
The discussion about alternatives to the FSAs is a sign of a healthy education system, where its constituents continually consider how best to know how schools are doing.
This is an excellent opportunity to examine alternative means to getting the snapshot of students’ literacy and numeracy skills that the FSA provides, but at great expense and with negative consequences for schools, teachers and students.
There are two viable sources of data that provide such a snapshot with significantly less disruption to teaching and learning, and that use high-quality tests administered to samples of students. These are the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) and the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).
The PCAP is administered by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), an intergovernmental group formed in 1967 by the provincial ministers of education. This is an assessment of reading, mathematics and science achievement administered to eighth-graders every three years. All three areas are tested in each administration of the test, although during each test administration one subject is the primary focus.
The other large-scale assessment that provides a snapshot of student achievement in basic skills is the PISA, an international assessment instituted in 1997 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. Seventy countries, including Canada, participate in the PISA.
The test alternates its focus on reading, mathematics and science achievement on a three-year cycle. Both of these testing programs recognize that school programs and curriculum can vary considerably, both across Canada and around the world. Neither assessment is tied to a particular curriculum, and the tests focus on the skills that would be considered basic for students across educational jurisdictions.
Both the PCAP and PISA include data about the context of learning, through surveys of teachers and students. Both assessments have been developed to answer big questions we all have about the quality of schools and student achievement. For example: How well are young adults prepared to meet the challenges of the future? Are they able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Are some kinds of teaching and school organization more effective than others?
Both the PCAP and PISA achieve the goal of providing comprehensive and comparable results on student achievement through the use of sampling procedures — testing a carefully selected sub-group of all students.
In 2010, 32,000 Grade 8 students from 1,600 schools across Canada took the PCAP. In 2009, 23,000 students from 1,000 schools across Canada took the PISA.
This strategy provides trustworthy evidence of students’ basic skills, and does so with less burden to schools, teachers, students and taxpayers.
In the discussion of alternatives to or re-inventions of the FSA, careful consideration ought to be given to whether its primary intended purpose may already be met by other well-established, regularly administered assessment programs that allow us to understand student achievement in B.C. in relation to other provinces and countries.
It may be that much of what we wish to capture in the snapshot of how well B.C. students are learning foundational skills in reading, writing, and numeracy is already available.
If something other than a snapshot is the goal of a provincial student assessment program, then we need to think carefully about how to meet those other goals appropriately.
Sandra Mathison is a professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC. She is an expert on educational evaluation and her recently published book, The Nature and Limits of Standards Based Reform and Assessment, examines many issues related to government-mandated testing programs.
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