To test - or not to test.
It's a question the board members of Living Sky School Division have been grappling with. Before they come up with a final answer, they first want to put the question to their principals and teachers.
Standardized testing is not everyone's ideal. Whether or not current measuring tools show an accurate or, more importantly, useful picture of how the division's students are doing is at issue.
The provincial government is working on a standardized assessment tool, and, whether they like it or not, it appears the school divisions across the province will be implementing the new tool, not for this coming school year, but for the one after that.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Education wants Saskatchewan schools to continue to use the Assessment for Learning (AFL) testing tool, despite its reputation for not being well-aligned with all the curricula currently being taught, and despite the fact it will be dumped by the Ministry when the new tool is ready.
All this has the Living Sky board asking, if AFL is not a useful testing tool, why bother? Why not just wait for the new one? And should they use another assessment tool in the meantime. Would it be worth the time, the effort and the cost?
These are the questions they want their administrators and teachers to consider. After all, said board members, they are the people who actually administer the tests (or not) and for whom the resulting data is supposed to be the most useful. Their input is important, said the board.
Should the decision be made to go ahead with a common assessment tool while waiting for the new one, a decision will have been made as to which tool to use. About half the schools in the division currently administer CAT4 testing for their own use. CAT4 is the newest version of the Canadian Achievement Tests a testing system that assesses basic skills in reading, language, spelling and mathematics and is widely used across Canada.
"CAT4 won't always match what the curriculum outcomes are in Saskatchewan," said Director of Education Randy Fox. "That doesn't mean that it still could not be valuable for us and give us some information that's valuable. Quite a few schools are using it now," he added, "but my understanding is, especially in the math part of it, it isn't as well aligned."
However, he noted it is probably still one of the best tools out there if they want to do something across the division.
Fox said, "There isn't a tool that exists that I know of that's going to measure everything that can be helpful about a young person. We can use a test that will give us an idea, for example, how a student is doing in math according to Canadian norms. It's not going to tell us how that student is doing in art, or if that student likes art more than math, which is really important when it comes to student engagement."
However, he is optimistic about the new tool being developed.
"They are looking at what we really need to measure and what's the data that's really going to be helpful to teachers and to our schools in general. Some improvements I think we'll see around the new model they use is that it will give us a true snapshot of skills and abilities of our students. It will have a wider range within items. One of the issues with AFL now is if a student is quite high or quite low in skills or knowledge in that area, it doesn't reach those extremes. So they are trying to build that in so there's a wider range in responses, what I call a kind of comparison factor to national norms and international norms."
Some board members are concerned about a common consensus on the new testing tool.
Garth Link said, "If this goes ahead, the last thing I want to see is an ongoing conflict, both at the board level and with the teachers etc, that this isn't the right tool, the proper tool, the correct tool. To me that's just a waste of time."
Link says he doesn't care what they use, as long as they can get some common agreement from the stakeholders.
"I'd like to see some buy-in," he said.
Fox noted it appears there will be consultation as the new tool is developed.
"That's already started with various groups including the STF (Saskatchewan Teachers Federation). I don't know what their input will be to the actual assessment tool. I believe there will be people contracted or assigned the work to develop this assessment tool, and when the provincial government looks at it and if it meets what they believe they need to know about how our Saskatchewan students are doing, it will become provincial policy. Some of the groups may or may not agree, but I really see it going forward. If we are mandated to use the provincial assessment we will use them."
Board member Roy Challis said, "I've spoken about this for a long time. I don't have a problem with assessment, I just have a problem with us thinking we're going to agree on what's going to be assessed."
Challis said he's not going to fight standardized testing, as long as they understand it isn't telling them what they need to know.
"That's why we have this difficulty," he said, "because we're trying to measure the immeasurable. We can measure what is measureable but that isn't going to tell us what we want to know about the kids' total development."
Board members Jack Snell and Ron Kowalski were in agreement that there was no need to move ahead with AFL testing. They said they should wait to do division-wide testing when the province had its new assessment in place.
Board member Bob Foreman wondered why, if the province is abandoning AFL, a tool they've been told is not all that accurate anyway, "Why would we spend any money or energy on it?"
Board member Glenn Wouters said, "I don't have much confidence in the government creating its own animal. I think I have as much confidence in the CAT4 as I do in anything right now. "
Chairman Ken Arsenault said there was a case for testing, in that "if we tested schools that weren't tested now with CAT4 in the spring, and on the same cycle the following year at least that would give us baseline data across the division."
Board member Ronna Pethick agreed that it would be a place to start.
"We've had this discussion for quite a while," said Arsenault. "We should have a decision on this."
He was hopeful the new assessment tool being developed would be a positive thing for the division.
"Things we've seen combined in other areas within the school division have paid us great dividends, as far as facilities and the positives for administration and teachers, so I can only see a common assessment tool may help us. For our transient students, too, if they carry common assessment between schools, it can only be a plus," said Arsenault.
In a related discussion, Fox informed the board the provincial ministry has also put the brakes on curriculum development. The ministry is doing a review, probably over the next six months to a year.
He also said the ministry is expecting school divisions to start developing SMART (Self-monitoring Approach to Reading and Thinking) goals. It has also changed the Continuous Improvement Framework to the Accountability Framework.
Fox said these recent pieces of information coming out of the ministry indicate it will be measuring not only students, but school divisions, and ultimately, school division boards.
"Whether we completely agree or not there is that expectation placed on us," said Fox.
