When the Common Core Standards were launched in 2009, one of the stipulations was that students take assessment tests in an online format by 2015. The time is now upon us, and reports on practice tests are streaming in. The outlook: shaky, at best.
Leaving content aside, many schools experienced technological problems that made administering the practice tests challenging. Ohio, one of the first states to begin testing, started practice PARCC tests in February. In the first month of testing, Pearson fielded nearly 10,000 phone calls, emails, and texts—86 percent of which were related to problems registering students and getting them into the online sessions. According to the Columbus Dispatch:
Some students experienced long wait times before they could start a test. Some couldn’t log in at all. A handful were booted out of the test before they finished. Exams crashed on certain Web browsers. Some districts reported that Chromebook computers struggled to support some tests.
Yet several of the problems of the online tests extend beyond the control of the testing companies themselves. Many schools lack the infrastructure to support school-wide online testing. Hardware and software are not the only problem; it’s also bandwidth. At California’s Natomas School District, teachers couldn’t administer the tests in adjoining classrooms without causing the computers to crash, so the district scheduled online tests in every other classroom.
Education technology advocate Evan Marwell says, “The typical U.S. school has the same bandwidth as a four- to five-person home—even though the average school has 600 students. Internet access and speed that adults take for granted at work isn’t available to our kids, even as education content just keeps getting better.” And, according to Marwell, low-poverty schools are three times more likely to have broadband than schools with high rates of poverty.
But even with smooth implementation of the testing software, schools have other concerns about students’ ability to be successful in an online testing environment. Online testing requires a set of skills that are not always taught in a structured setting: digital literacy.
Many students lack the technology skills necessary to understand the interface of the test and how to operate certain controls. At Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks, California, testing coordinator Kim Estrada observed large gaps in students’ technological fluency. “Some kids didn’t even know how to find the on and off switch or how the touch screen worked,” she says.
Estrada notes that the tests require students to know how to drag and drop, plot points on a graph, and have strong typing skills for completing essays. In addition, Allan Miedema, technology director of the Northshore School District in Bothell, Washington, says that students should have familiarity with key layout (especially delete, arrow keys, and the space bar), how to select text, and how to operate drop-down menus. For a student with no access to a computer or a tablet at home, these are fairly sophisticated skills.
So how should schools manage preparing their students for an online testing environment, besides attempting to iron out implementation issues? According to Jon Cohen, executive vice president for the nonprofit organization American Institutes for Research (AIR) and director of the Assessment Program, one way to ease the transition to online testing is to adapt the test to the students and their environment. An example of this would be to integrate the test into the regular classroom schedule. This would allow schools to stay open during testing times and would also help combat student fatigue. Teachers could stop the test when needed and pick it back up again at a convenient time in the future—within the test parameters—until all of the students finished.
However, that doesn’t solve the issue of lack of digital literacy skills in the general student body. While giving the students more time helps release the pressure of testing in a new space, it doesn’t necessarily allow students to learn the technological skills necessary for the test—and for the working world—in an organic environment. This is why classroom technology matters right now. It’s a matter of familiarizing students with the digital space so that it becomes as second nature to them as using a pencil or pen. And kids do not pick up a pencil and pen and just start writing on their own. They are taught how to do so.
Classroom technology is not just a passing educational trend, or a way to keep students engaged by meeting them on “their turf.” Statistics make it clear that even the so-called “digital native” generation needs classroom training in digital literacy. Just because a child can swipe through her mom’s iPad or play video games with dad, doesn’t make her computer literate. It doesn’t give her proficiency in web navigation and internet research. It doesn’t mean she can understand the interface of different operating systems and browsers. It doesn’t develop visual fluency in the digital space—skills that are necessary in order to recognize, for example, an appropriate response when faced with a single-answer radio button vs. a multiple-answer check box during an online test.
Do your students visually recognize that a circle indicates only a single answer is allowed, and that a square indicates that there could be more than one answer? How could this type of visual fluency in the digital space support your student outcomes?
Online testing aside, these are literacy skills children will need to develop in order to effectively navigate in the digital space.
There’s always been culture shock when students leave the shelter of academia for the real world. However, the gap between what students learn in school and what is needed in the real world has never been wider. Digital literacy is literacy. And the United States is falling way behind the rest of the world. Classroom technology should be a priority in our children’s education—the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and the skills. And the time for action is now.
Interested in integrating the development of digital literacy across the curriculum? Find out how with Portals School.
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