Research Alert
Student Absenteeism Becoming Key School Metric
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states are required to measure school performance using four academic indicators and a fifth "non-academic" measure. According to a September 2017 report from FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, 36 states and the District of Columbia have decided to use chronic absenteeism as that fifth measure.
The report, coauthored by FutureEd's Phyllis W. Jordan and Raegen Miller, reviews the research on absenteeism and its correlation to student performance and well-being: Less time in school results in "weaker reading skills, higher retention rates, and lagging development of the social skills needed to persist in school." At the secondary level, students who are chronically absent are at greater risk of dropping out.
FutureEd's analysis of states' ESSA plans (including drafts submitted to the Department of Education at the time of the report's publication) examined how states define chronic absenteeism. At least 27 states dictate that missing 10 percent or more of enrolled days constitutes chronic absence. Five other states use the reverse metric: Students must attend 90 percent or more of days to not be considered chronically absent. Two states set more ambitious metrics based on percentages, and three states use a specific number of school days.
Jordan and Miller say that the emphasis on chronic absenteeism in state ESSA plans may lead to improved attendance, but teachers and administrators may need support in making use of the data. The authors suggest that districts provide resources like early warning systems, plus professional development courses on how to address chronic absenteeism and how to bring up attendance issues in conversations with parents. "Ultimately, students will benefit most if policymakers and practitioners use the new ESSA absenteeism data to learn why students are not attending school and what will bring them back."
The report, "Who's In: Chronic Absenteeism Under the Every Student Succeeds Act," is available at www.future-ed.org.
Snapshot
A "Ruff" Test
China's two-day, high-pressure national college entrance exam, known as the Gaokao, is said to be one of the world's most difficult assessments. This golden retriever, named Huniu, stands watch with a blessing board—and provides a little levity to tense families—while waiting for his student-owner to complete the exam in Wuhan, China.
Wang huan/Imaginechina/AP images
Seen on the Screen
Bringing Passion to Performance Assessment
To give students a greater stake in assessments, the Oakland Unified School District in California has turned to graduate capstone projects. In a video produced by the Learning Policy Institute, superintendent Preston Thomas says that one of the district's goals is to make sure every high school graduate is college- and career-ready—and the capstone projects are one key step toward that goal. With these performance assessments, students explore issues they are passionate about and work toward finding solutions to problems like sexism in video games and lack of access to reproductive health care. Watch the video.
School Tools
Measuring Social-Emotional Skills
Programs and lessons that nurture social-emotional learning are common in schools—all aimed at strengthening qualities that prepare children for life outside of school. But how do you measure whether a young person has "mastered" something like self-awareness? Or whether a program to strengthen those skills is effective? The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) took on this question through its Measuring SEL Design Challenge, a contest that welcomed designs for assessing social-emotional skills in school settings. Watch a free webinar on CASEL's website to hear four winners explain their designs.
Turn and Talk
Q & A
with James Pellegrino, distinguished professor of psychology and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute, and member of the technical advisory committees for the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments.
What ingredients are needed for a good performance assessment?
Certain things characterize any good performance task. One, it engages students in demonstrating their ability to think and reason about some important content knowledge and apply that knowledge to answer an interesting question, solve a problem, or explain some phenomenon. It shows students' ability to think about how their knowledge can be applied to whatever situation the task is presenting.
Second, the question or problem being posed must be one worthy of a student spending some time answering it. In the 1990s, there was a great push for performance tasks. But people didn't think seriously about what made for a good task. Often, we were asking students to just follow a set of procedures; we weren't engaging them in significant reasoning. We've learned we must be clear what the task is all about and what evidence—with respect to knowledge, skills, and reasoning—it's supposed to provide us.
Finally, not only must we be clear what we're asking students to show us, but students also need to be clear on what we're asking of them in terms of a response.
What can teachers take away from what we've learned through implementing assessments like PARCC and Smarter Balanced?
What's happened in the world of assessment, through the work of translating the Common Core standards into valid assessments, is a focus on evidence-centered design. That means that what makes for good assessment isn't whether it's a multiple-choice item, performance task, or whatever, but asking yourself, "What evidence am I looking for that will convince me and others the student has the knowledge and skills defined by the standards?"
Standards don't always give you the clues. You have to translate the standards into the evidence showing that kids understand and can reason about something like changes in the properties of substances associated with chemical reactions. What would they have to show me that would convince me—or allow me to convince someone else—that they've developed the knowledge and skills intended by the standards?
You're helping to create assessments tied to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). What will these look like?
That's been a challenge! We've been able to consider the contrast between what we typically do with assessment given the standards we had before and what science assessment needs to look like now. In the past, we had content standards and inquiry standards, and much of the assessment of science was about factual content. We weren't asking students to reason about the content; we were asking them whether they had learned a series of facts or whether they could execute some procedure or calculation. On the inquiry side, we'd ask them to demonstrate that, for instance, they could control variables to construct an unbiased experiment. We never asked them to choose what variables to manipulate or explain why those were the important variables.
With NGSS, we've clarified that we want students to have knowledge that reflects the integration of three dimensions: disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts. For you to demonstrate that you understand something important about the properties of substances that make them chemically the same or different, you're not just going to tell me that it's the density or boiling point that makes substances the same or different. You're going to demonstrate that you understand that those characteristics are important by selecting from a set of data the substances that are the same or different and constructing an argument about why this is so. It's knowledge-in-use.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Numbers of Note
Testing 1, 2, 3
In a 2016 survey by NWEA and Gallup, parents, teachers, and administrators offered their perceptions of K–12 assessment.
7 in 10 teachers, principals, and superintendents believe students spend too much time taking assessments.
92% of principals think formative assessment that provides immediate feedback is useful.
45% of teachers report that they collaborate on assessment results daily or weekly with other teachers.
61% of parents say their child's teachers rarely or never discuss their child's assessment results with them.
Source: Gallup and NWEA. (2016). Make Assessment Work for All Students: Multiple Measures Matter.
Relevant Reads
New Books Call for Holistic Assessment
Page Turner
"There is not a single standardized assessment tool that can take the place of the daily feedback of a caring, informed professional."
