A look at curriculum-anchored assessment

The need for a new testing paradigm

Late this past summer, in schools around the country, teachers wanted to learn more about what their students knew and could do. This information would have helped them plan lessons that started from the place where their students were. Some teachers may have looked at last spring’s state assessment data for clues as to their new students’ areas of strength and areas requiring improvement.

For those teachers who the data, the effort may have been an exercise in frustration. What many teachers discovered, after they reviewed the data, is that the results of state assessments provided little information about their students. The results provide little detail about what students know and can do. The data doesn’t show whether students understand specific skills, or prerequisites, to what they’ll learn this school year. The data barely indicates whether students have learned the content they were required to learn the previous year.  

So, many of those teachers ended up doing what teachers have done for generations. They used precious class time checking for understanding.

Several state education departments around the U.S. have come to understand the issues that teachers and school leaders have with the data generated by annual state assessments. These assessments, required by federal law, do an adequate job of painting a picture of how well a school or district is serving each student. The data is sufficient for federal accountability purposes.

However, the data is insufficient for teachers to use to make decisions that will help one student or the whole class. So, state education officials are exploring what can be done to gather and present data on student achievement that will be helpful in the classroom.

Among the test design concepts that states could explore are curriculum-anchored assessments.

What are curriculum-anchored assessments?

Curriculum-anchored assessments “intentionally connect assessments used to make judgments about students’ growth and achievement to students’ learning experiences in their classrooms” (Badrinarayan and Steiner, n.d.). They are a subset of the class of assessments known as through-year (or through-course) assessments.

Through-year assessments measure student performance multiple times over the school year through periodic assessments instead of during a single sitting close to the end of the year. This process allows educators, families and students to receive data on performance when it can inform teaching and learning. To ensure this data is accurate and actionable, it is essential through-year assessments are also anchored in high-quality curriculum.

(Badrinarayan and Steiner, n.d.)

Badrinarayan and Steiner, in their report about curriculum-anchored assessment, talked about a continuum of curriculum anchoring of through-year assessments. In a web post at the Center for Assessment, Badrinarayan and Dadey defined the continuum as one that ran from curriculum-agnostic to curriculum-specific.

A curriculum-agnostic through-year assessment system is one that essentially ignores the curriculum that students interact with, instead focusing on alignment of the assessment to some other criteria—usually the state’s content standards.

A curriculum-specific through-year assessment system is one that explicitly connects the curriculum that students interact with to the assessments being administered.

Badrinarayan and Dadey went on to define three leverage points that could be used to influence the degree to which a through-year assessment system is curriculum-specific.

• Assessment domain: What is being assessed.
• Assessment implementation: Decisions about administration structure, timing, and flexibility.
• Assessment interpretation and use: What data to provide and the supports given to stakeholders alongside the data.

What states are doing to innovate their assessment systems

In Measuring Forward: Emerging Trends in K-12 Assessment Innovation (2021), a report released by seven organizations including the Center for Assessment, “A significant movement is underway across the nation to design K-12 assessment systems that better equip stakeholders to provide an equitable and excellent education to each child.” A policy brief by the Learning Policy Institute (2023) puts the number of states working on efforts to improve and innovate their assessment systems at more than twenty.

The Measuring Forward report organized the work that states are doing into five categories.

• Curriculum and instructionally-embedded assessments: Assessments that are embedded in high-quality curriculum and administered as part of the flow of instruction.
• Performance assessment: Assessments that require a student to demonstrate a skill or conceptual understanding in a new or novel context.
• Replacement of traditional graduation requirements: Deeper forms of assessment (performance assessments, capstone projects, portfolio defense) replacing use of standardized testing and diploma requirements.
• Shared quality criteria: Several states have developed and implemented a variety of tools, templates, and processes, such as scoring calibration protocols, that provide educators with common language and learning goals to increase technical quality of assessments without requiring standardization of the assessment itself.
• Task/item banks: Banks of state, vendor, or teacher-created assessment items that can be pulled at any time for teacher use in the classroom based on the natural flow of their curriculum.

(Measuring forward, 2021)

After investigating these innovation projects, I found that maybe only three or four are working to integrate curriculum and assessment. From my perspective, the projects are trending more toward curriculum-agnostic assessment programs rather than being curriculum-specific.

I might be too early, or too harsh, in my preliminary evaluations of curriculum and instructionally-embedded assessment innovations. However, I also think that there are challenges to implementation that are inhibiting states from pursuing true curriculum-anchored assessments.

Implementation challenges

The Measuring Forward report identified three challenges to implementing innovative assessments in any of the five categories they identified.

• Limited federal flexibility
• Cost
• Desire for consistent data for decision making

I am not going to try and discuss the cost implications of innovative assessment programs. At this point, I’m not sure there is enough information available about both the short-term and long-term costs of implementing an innovative assessment program. For the 20 or more states currently working on innovative assessment, there are certainly implementation costs.

The federal government requires that innovative assessments be built alongside the state’s current assessment program. That means that each state must continue to spend money on the administration of its current program while also spending money developing and field testing the new one.

This brings me to an area that I do want to focus on, the limited flexibility the federal government has provided to those states building innovative assessment programs.

Limited to no federal flexibility

The Learning Policy Institute’s policy brief identifies two primary sources of federal funding for the development of innovative assessments.

• The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) “intentionally created opportunities for assessment innovation by explicitly allowing the use of multiple types of assessments, including ‘portfolios, projects, or extended-performance tasks’ as part of state systems” (Badrinarayan & Darling-Hammond, 2023).
• The Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA), which is part of ESSA, invited up to seven states “to implement new approaches to assessment and gradually scale them statewide” (Badrinarayan & Darling-Hammond, 2023).

Neither of these funding sources offers the kinds of flexibility that states need to develop and field test curriculum-specific assessments (the subset of curriculum-anchored assessments most closely tied to the curricula teachers are using). For starters, the application process is “so onerous and constraining that few states have yet been able to use IADA to implement assessment designs” (Badrinarayan & Darling-Hammond, 2023). Even if a state receives approval to try something innovative, it runs into four regulatory limitations

1. No planning time—States must use test results for accountability upon approval.
2. Timeline to scale—States must present a plan to scale statewide within five years regardless of design or state characteristics.
3. Comparability—Innovative tests must demonstrate strict comparability to the traditional tests in order for the scores to be used in the same school accountability system despite their unique designs and desire to create something that better captures student learning and addresses student needs.
4. Traditional technical quality requirements—Innovative systems must meet the federal technical quality requirements crafted for a single end-of-year assessment despite different designs and evolved approaches to ensuring quality.

(Measuring forward, 2021)

What does this mean for state assessments?

Despite challenges to implementation and federal regulations that are inflexible, states are moving ahead with the development of innovative assessments. However, none of them are focused on developing curriculum-specific assessments. The implementation and regulatory hurdles are, for now, just too high to overcome.

States are still trying to innovate, but they are focusing on other areas. Many states have chosen to focus on performance assessments—on expanding the pool of item and task types that states can use to build an assessment program. Several other states have chosen to focus on through-year assessments that are generally curriculum-agnostic.

There are multiple projects, and many people, looking to use innovative assessments to improve the data gathered about student academic achievement. These state education leaders, and their colleagues, are doing great things despite the challenges they face. However, they are unable to explore truly innovative assessment ideas, like curriculum-specific assessments, because of the implementation and regulatory landscape. Perhaps, over the coming years, this will change.

Update (Nov. 29, 2023)

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona sent a letter earlier this month to the country’s Chief State School Officers announcing changes to IADA and clarifying how States can leverage IADA to build a “high quality assessment system.” I will incorporate the contents of this letter into future posts as a response to criticisms about the inflexibility of the federal government’s assessment innovation policies.

You can access the letter here.

References

Badrinarayan, A., & Dadey, N. (2022). In search of the “just right” connection between curriculum and assessment. Center for Assessment. https://www.nciea.org/blog/in-search-of-the-just-right-connection-between-curriculum-and-assessment/

Badrinarayan, A., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2023). Developing state assessment systems that support teaching and learning: What can the federal government do? Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/developing-assessment-systems-federal-support-brief

Badrinarayan, A., & Steiner, D. (n.d.). Positioning state assessment systems in service to teaching and learning. Education First. https://www.education-first.com/library/publication/positioning-state-assessment-systems-in-service-to-teaching-and-learning/

Measuring forward: Emerging trends in k-12 assessment innovation. (2021). KnowledgeWorks. https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/emerging-trends-k12-assessment-innovation/

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