Soon-to-be-released statewide test scores are expected to be much lower than they were in the past, but top education officials say the drop is due to a more difficult grading system, not poor-performing students.<\/p>
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister says the state has a new way of measuring student proficiency.<\/p>
\u201cThis has been a time of recalibrating,\u201d she said in an interview after a press conference held with reporters to explain the declining scores.<\/p>
<\/p>
Previous benchmarks for determining student proficiency were too low, and inflated student achievement, Hofmeister says. This was a disservice, she says, because many students thought they were doing well, but had to take remedial courses when they went to college.<\/p>
Hofmeister says the low scores may come as a jolt.<\/p>
\u201cThere may be a family that has had students that were advanced, and now they may be showing proficient,\u201d she said.<\/p>
When students take a state test, their scores fall into one of four categories, ranging from \u201cadvanced\u201d and \u201cproficient\u201d to \u201climited knowledge\u201d and \u201cunsatisfactory.\u201d<\/p>
Hofmeister says the new benchmarks for each score category align with the benchmarks set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP. These congressionally mandated academic benchmarks are used to compare student achievement across states.<\/p>
\u201cWe\u2019re now defining proficient the way the rest of the country defines proficient,\u201d she said.<\/p>
Almost two decades of NAEP data shows Oklahoma students have consistently scored lower than the national average in reading and math, but Oklahoma\u2019s low benchmarks made it look like this wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>
For example: Using Oklahoma-set benchmarks, 70 percent of the state\u2019s fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2015. Using NAEP\u2019s benchmarks, however, only 33 percent scored proficient.<\/p>
In 2016, the state adopted new, more rigorous academic standards, which education officials expect will lead to higher test scores. Hofmeister says it will take a couple years to see improvements.<\/p>
She also says these changes in grading benchmarks will make it difficult, if not impossible, to compare this year\u2019s test scores to any scores from the past.<\/p>
\u201cThis will be a complete reset,\u201d she said. \u201cEverything is different.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soon-to-be-released statewide test scores are expected to be much lower than they were in the past, but top education officials say the drop is due to a more difficult grading system, not poor-performing students.State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister says the state has a new way of measuring student proficiency.\u201cThis has been a time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[855,731,733,732],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28731"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28887,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28731\/revisions\/28887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}