Mahomet-Seymour sixth grade student Jessica Smith has taken a lot of standardized tests during her seven years as a student.
Every year, Mahomet-Seymour students like Smith answer questions about letter sound recognition when they take the Illinois Snapshots of Early Literacy (ISEL) assessment in kindergarten. They file into the computer lab at Sangamon Elementary to take Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests. And until this year, they sharpened their number two pencils at Lincoln Trail, MSJHS and MSHS to take the Illinois State Achievement Tests (ISATs) or the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE).
This year brings a new acronym to the mix: PARCC testing. Mahomet-Seymour students will begin the test on March 2, and the question on everyone’s mind is “how is this going to work?”
One person who was given the task of answering that question for the Mahomet-Seymour School District is Mary Weaver, director of Instruction for Mahomet-Seymour Schools.
PARCC, which stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, is the new Illinois state assessment, replacing ISATs, according to Weaver.
“The PARCC is computer-based and the questions are like nothing we’ve ever seen before” in state testing, she noted. Rather than answering multiple choice questions, students are called upon to analyze information and explain their answers.
“The test is more curriculum-based,” said Jeff Starwalt, principal of Lincoln Trail. “Our students should be prepared for the test if we are doing what we are supposed to do in our instruction.”
“PARCC replicates good instruction,” Weaver added. ‘For the ISATs, we could teach kids how to answer the questions. For the PARCC, students have to problem solve. What they are assessed on is already imbedded in our instruction.”
Having to explain and analyze is something fifth grader Luke Koller noticed when he took a PARCC practice test. “It seems harder than the ISATs. Before, I could just look at a question and I knew what the answer was right away.” He said he thinks he will have to put more thought into answering questions on the PARCC test.
Smith noticed this difference too. “In math, you couldn’t just answer the question. You had to explain how you got your answer,” she said.
As the tests’ name implies, the assessment is designed to let school districts know how well they are preparing students for life after high school. According to information provided by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) “20 percent of all college students must take remedial courses when they get to college … after students did everything required to graduate from high school.”
PARCC is aligned to the Illinois Learning Standards based on the Common Core curriculum.
Since the PARCC assessment is computer-based, Weaver said the district had to make sure it had the technical support and infrastructure to administer the test. To a certain extent, members of the Mahomet-Seymour community helped make this possible.
Students will take the PARCC test on Chromebooks, small laptop computers which run primarily off the Internet, partial funding for which came from the Parent Teacher Organization and The Mahomet-Seymour Education Foundation. District funds and business donations also contributed to the Chromebooks purchase.
While the Chromebooks were purchased with PARCC testing in mind “it is something the teachers use daily,” Weaver said.
The district did not have to elect to take the computerized version of the assessment. “We could have done the paper/pencil test, but we determined in the fall we have the capacity to do the computerized test. The computerized test is more interactive for students. Illinois also has indicated the test will be computer-based next year,” Weaver said.
Computerized testing versus paper/pencil testing was recently in the news as officials from the Chicago Public Schools system indicated their schools did not have the funding or the technology available to take the test on-line.
Mahomet does have the technology, but not for all students at the same time, Starwalt indicated.
“Our goal is to be able to do 3 classes at a time,” he said. Enough Chromebooks for all students in a class will be brought to the room. Students in that room will test for the allotted amount of time, then the computers will be moved to the next classroom for testing.
“The hardest part so far has been scheduling,” Starwalt indicated.
There will be two testing blocks for this school year, he added. The March block consists of five testing sessions of around 75 minutes each, start to finish. Another block in May will consist of three blocks of testing. While this may seem like a lot of time devoted to testing, Weaver notes given the entire school year, those time blocks add up to less than one-percent of instruction time for the year.
Only Lincoln Trail, the Junior High and the High School are participating in PARCC testing. And at the High School, only students taking Algebra I/Algebra 1B and English I are tested. The tests for all grade levels will cover math and language arts, according to Weaver.
At the high school level, PARCC testing may eventually replace the state-funded ACT.
“The State said they will test everyone in grades 9-11 in the future,” Weaver said. This year, “their budget was reduced so they only chose one grade level and kept funding the ACT.”
Getting Ready
Once the instrument on which to test was in place and the schedule was established, the final part of getting ready for PARCC was “making sure we have the wireless connectivity and enough access points,” according to Weaver.
MS staff also conducted several trial runs to make sure a large number of students were able to access the system at the same time. One staff member who was part of the trial was fifth grade teacher Ben Herriott.
“My class was one of several that was selected to help ensure that we were able to successfully login and take a sample PARCC assessment. As with most things new, there were some kinks that needed to be worked on both on the side of PARCC and on our side,” he said.
“There are many logistical layers that needed to be determined and managed so that the testing was successful. Classrooms needed to work together so we could have the correct number of Chromebooks for students to take the assessment. The Chromebooks needed to be running the most current updates. At Lincoln Trail we needed to determine where the Internet access points were so that each student could log on without Internet interruption. Students had to sign in with login information and passwords that had to be generated in advance. There was a lot of collaboration between the classrooms that were testing, the administration and tech specialist here at Lincoln Trail, and the help of Mary Weaver and Ric Rose (Director of Education Technology) as they worked directly with PARCC.”
During those practice tests, students were to experiment with various computerized tools built in to the PARCC assessment, such as drop down boxes, highlighting, and embedded videos,” according to Starwalt.
Student Reaction
Student reaction was mixed to the practice tests.
Emma Hensley, a fifth grade student in Herriott’s class, said she found some of the math questions to be confusing, but she liked the feature where she could mark a problem and go back to it at a later time if she wanted to.
Smith said she liked how she could click on multiple choice answers and eliminate choices. She said she also liked the ability to flag a question and go back to it at a later time.
“Sometimes in the booklet, it was hard to find the question you wanted to go back to,” she stated.
Koller said for him, it is easier to read on paper rather than on a computer screen.
Both Starwalt and Weaver commented students are more in tune to technology, and they hope that translates into an easier time adapting to a computer-based test. Herriott said he thinks the trial runs have helped his students.
“My students were very patient while the bugs that we did encounter were being worked out,” he said. “They have also been very helpful in sharing their experiences during the practice tests, such as learning what tools are available during the test and how to access each of them. This test is like nothing they have experienced before so the practices have been very helpful in introducing them to what they will be seeing in March.”
PARRC Controversy
While students and staff in Mahomet prepare for the assessment, PARCC is not without controversy nationally. Several states who were slated to use PARCC have opted out, leaving Illinois only one of 10 states electing to take the test, according to Weaver. School districts, like Chicago, are finding they are just do not have the technology or the funding to take the computerized test. There also is negativity associated with Common Core, which PARCC is aligned to assess,
Despite controversy, the Illinois State Board of education has chosen to participate in PARCC testing and Mahomet-Seymour schools will comply with the mandate. In Ohio, groups of parents are petitioning school districts to opt out of PARCC testing. According to Weaver, that has crossed the minds of a few M-S parents.
“We’ve had a very limited number asking about our opt out policy. We cannot create an opt out policy as we are required to assess all students,” she said.
The results from trial runs in Mahomet suggest the computer system should be able to handle students taking the test. Pearson, the company that developed the PARCC test, held its own dry runs to ensure multiple users from multiple states wouldn’t crash its computer system, said Weaver.
Students throughout Mahomet-Seymour will take the tests starting Monday and lasting through Spring Break. The week following Spring Break will be used for any make-up tests, according to Weaver. Students will take the second round of PARCC testing April 27 through May 22.
“I do like this test better than the MAP testing,” said Smith. “This test doesn’t give me a headache like MAP testing does.”
“I don’t get worried about the tests,” stated Koller. “I don’t look forward to it, but I know I have to do it. I know it’s important, so I try my best.”
Anyone interested in learning more about PARCC testing can go to the following Web sites:
http://www.isbe.net/assessment/parcc.htm
If you are interested in finding out more about test content and seeing sample questions, go to:
