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Reporting on the state of education in your community and across the country.

Less Than One Month Until Students Take The Latest Round of PARCC Exams

Screen capture of online practice question

It's the final countdown.

In just a few weeks, Ohio's students will take the first set of spring exams aligned to the Common Core.

While approximately 70,000 students took a statewide trial run of the exams last spring, those results didn't actually count. The Ohio Department of Education administered that specific set of assessments as a way to test the test, shedding light on any glaring errors before the “real” tests roll out on February 16.

And this new batch looks pretty different compared to previous versions of Ohio's standardized tests.

As StateImpact mentioned when the first round of practice questions popped up last year, there are a handful of big changes to the two rounds of testing: most districts will take the exams strictly on computers, there will be fewer multiple choice questions, and a higher level of analytical thinking will be required.

“Our state tests are really showing us, 'how do we know that the students can know and do what we want them to be able to do in our standards,'” Ohio Educator Leader Cadre member Char Shryock told a group of reporters during a webinar on Tuesday outlining the updates. “It’s the evidence of our learning. It’s the tool to collect that evidence.”

Now, a new set of standards calls for a new set of similarly-aligned tests.  Along with a handful of other states nationwide, Ohio joined the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, more commonly known as PARCC, to develop a new set of related exams.

The setup of the past exams may have allowed students to easily just guess a correct answer, Shryock said, but that’s not quite the case anymore under PARCC.

“Our new standards talk about the ability to use context to help you build vocabulary and understand meanings of the word,” she said. “The new PARCC assessment item really gets at the evidence piece. Not only are we asking them the meaning of the word in context, but now we’re asking them what evidence would you have used to understand that word.“

A new set of practice tests recently popped up online--you can attempt one yourself by logging onto the PARCC website--highlighting the changes. English sections call for reading and analyzing multiple passages at once, while several sections of math exams are broken down into multi-part question and answer sessions.

The new round of practice tests make it clear that technology’s a big factor, too. Students can highlight and enlarge certain portions of text. Some questions call for dragging and dropping responses into a separate box or selecting multiple answers at once.

In the past, some administrators have questioned the test’s technology.

“The students were kind of overwhelmed with the way it was formatted,” Lorain City Schools eighth grade English teacher Jennifer George told StateImpact last spring. “The stories, they would have to keep scrolling back to find things.  We teach them close reading skills, when you’re looking for answers and highlighting and starring things, and they were having trouble using the tools to do that.”

When it comes to the tests and standards themselves, ODE administrator Brian Bickley pointed out teachers may feel less inclined to be pressured to “teach to the test,” a common argument against standardized testing

“You’re going to start seeing the test aligned to the teaching,” said Bickley. “If teachers are really teaching the standards and following the local curriculum, the test is going to be fine. The students are going to perform fine because they understand the content, and it’s not going to matter if you ask the question online or on paper, the student knows the material.”Districts are expected to receive results of the exams by the fall.