Week one article summaries ECOMP 6202

Article one: Managing Test Anxiety in Today's High Stakes Testing Era
In this first article the author shares his personal experiences as a parent dealing with the anxiety of online testing. The author of this post is a Psychologist and author.  In this particular case the source of the anxiety seems to be what the scores will mean.
He recalls 
"I nearly fell out of my chair when, in perfect harmony, my kids said, "The test doesn't matter for our grades"..."It's really just to test how good the teachers are teaching"... "It really doesn't matter... right Mom and Dad?"
So that begs the question of what exactly the scores are for.  With our former state test, the NECAP, we knew that these scores were to be used to determine school who were in need of improvement.  Is that what we should expect from Smarter Balanced or PARCC testing or is there the possibility that we will get actionable data from this test?
The author mentions years of their students taking STAR tests.  We have the same tests in our district and I find the data to be extremely helpful in diagnosing what skills the students need to work on.  The students know that the purpose of these assessments is to help determine what they will learn next.  They are also included in the analysis of their results, tracking their progress.  
Dr. Peters goes on to describe how his children had thoughts of "does my future depend on this test?" and "what happens if I fail?".  I believe if we give our students and parents a clear reason for taking the assessment and not "because they are making me", we can prevent much of the anxiety about the testing.

Article two: High Anxiety among Parents with PARCC testing Looming
This second article further illustrates that how teachers approach the situation does effect how the students will react.  Steve Monoghan, the president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers was quoted in the article saying ""I don't want to sound like teachers are running around like the sky is falling. They are professionals and they are handling it in a professional way, but they are frustrated." And what are the teachers anxious about?  You guessed it, just like the previous article the anxiety is centered around what is going to be done with the results. Parents are similarly worried whether their child's scores are going to effect placement in honors classes or classes in high school.  
Amanda McElfresh, the educational reporter in this article goes on to explain that the results of this first round of testing will not be available until the Fall.  Now, this is contrary to what I have been told, so I would like to verify this, but if that is true then that only adds to the problem of what good is the information we get from it.  Is it worth the trouble.  We need to ensure that the answer to that question is YES if we are ever going to quell anxiety about the test.  
The reporter goes on to explain that the very fact that we have not seen the test and that this is the first time we will see it will also produce anxiety. 

Article three: 
For this third article, I was particularly interested in finding articles about Smarter Balanced testing anxiety.  It is worth noting that this was a much tougher topic to find articles on.  Perhaps it is lesser known or maybe Pearson is just an easy target, but I thought that was noteworthy.

Anyway, in this article an educator, Steven Rasmussen, takes aim at the test items themselves as the cause of anxiety.  Steven is also a publisher of mathematics curriculum and software and he took this background to take the test and put it to the....well to put it to the test.  
He found that in many cases the "technology" of the test gets in the way more than helps.  He sites an example where fractional rates are contrived to produce a whole number answer and that the click and drag feature will automatically snap to the nearest whole number, thus eliminating the possibility of a child even selecting a fractional result.  I have seen similar issues with the test where they child drags numbers into blanks rather than typing them, just so that the test makers can claim that it is technology enhanced and innovative.
In another problem the test taker is asked to show their work on a geometry problem.  As Rasmussen points out, the first thing most of us would do and encourage our students to do is to draw a picture.  But that was not an option when the student is only given a text box. 

Rasmussen goes on to site other examples of technology getting more in the way than enhancing the experience, but I have to tell you, things that I believed would throw kids for a loop simply didn't.  We tend to look at these things as we would feel about them.  "they will spend hours looking at a computer screen!" Hello, these kids are used to spending long spans of time on a screen, have you watched a child in their free time lately?  "The tools will confuse and frustrate them!" No, actually what I have seen happen is that the kids are not afraid to experiment to find out what the tool does and they adapted very quickly.  Now, we as adults may be perplexed by these tools but we are not going in with the same background or approach that these kids are. Yes, sometimes the technology did seem to get int he way, but I would hardly describe them as frustrating or anxiety producing for students.


Summary:
So what I found in these articles was that most of the anxiety seems to be coming from the adults worrying about what the scores will be used for.  They are worried about how the kids will deal with it.  They are worried that their child will have a horribly negative experience.  And until we provide parents and teachers with evidence that we are going to benefit from the experience and that the children will not crumble to pieces when asked to answer questions on a computer, then we are going to continue to have anxiety about online testing.  The reality is that formative assessment is going to become more important than ever because the technology helps us deal with the data so efficiently and can sort and display it in so many ways that the benefits are just to great not to try to perfect this process.

Articles cited
 Peters, P. (n.d.). Managing Test Anxiety in Today's High Stakes Testing Era. Retrieved May 7, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-b-peters-phd/managing-test-anxiety-in-todays-high-stakes-testing-era_b_7172632.html  

 High anxiety among parents with PARCC test looming. (n.d.). Retrieved May 7, 2015, from http://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/local/education/2015/03/01/parcc-tests-proceed-amid-unanswered-questions/24213635/
 Why the Smarter Balanced Common Core Math Test is Fatally Flawed (EdSurge News). (2015, March 11). Retrieved May 7, 2015, from https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-03-11-why-the-smarter-balanced-common-core-math-test-is-fatally-flawed