Good-bye, ACT Aspire. Hello, ATLAS.
More than 250,000 Arkansas public school students in grades three through 10 will take for the first time this school year the state-required Arkansas Teaching and Learning Assessment System tests -- or ATLAS -- in English/language arts, math and science.
The window for schools to give the largely online, adaptive tests opens April 15 and goes through May 24. An ATLAS writing test -- the score of which will be combined with reading for a language arts score -- was given in March.
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva said the ATLAS acronym for the new $71 million, seven-year system is particularly fitting.
"It kind of symbolizes (that) it's a road map," Oliva said in a recent interview. "(The testing system) is to help inform parents, students and educators on how they can better meet student needs throughout their educational journey."
The response to the new test varies among some educators.
Steven Helmick, principal at Little Rock's Don Roberts Elementary and the state's 2023 Elementary Principal of the Year, said last week that a new assessment can always be expected to present challenges. His staff has responded "by providing solid standards-based instruction throughout the school year."
Additionally, the students have been given practice and interim tests so they are familiar with the test format, he said. The administrative team at Roberts will meet individually with each student before the test to encourage them to do their best.
"Our students, like all students in the state, are much more than a test score," Helmick said, "but we want to ensure they are prepared as much as possible to be able to showcase their knowledge through the new summative assessment."
Preparation for the new testing system has raised some concerns among teachers.
An informal survey this week of teachers by April Reisma, president of the Arkansas Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, prompted some responders to say that training for the test administration has been short or that teachers had to do the training online on their own, or that the training dealt only with one aspect of the testing such as test security.
A couple of responders questioned whether lack of teacher preparation for the new test is a way to ensure poor student performance in the public schools.
SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES
The state's old Aspire tests -- given online for the past seven years -- and the new ATLAS tests cover the same broad subject areas of math, English/language arts and science. And both tests have or will enable the state to meet state and federal requirements for measuring achievement and holding schools accountable to student learning, hence the state-applied A-to-F school letter grades announced yearly.
But differences in the two testing programs are significant, Oliva said.
The Aspire test -- published by the same company that produces the ACT college entrance exam -- has been a test of a student's readiness for college and careers.
In contrast, the ATLAS test -- "a criterion-reference test" -- is meant to be a measure of a student's mastery of Arkansas' recently revised education standards in the core academic subjects.
"Those standards are important because they outline in each subject, by grade level, what it is we expect students to learn," Oliva said, "After updating the standards, we wanted to make sure we had the criterion-referenced assessment to measure those standards and to tell us whether students are learning what we expect them to learn.
"It's a big shift," he said.
'ARKANSAS SPECIFIC'
The revised education standards and the new testing program are "Arkansas specific," Oliva also said. Both were prepared by work groups made up of Arkansas educators, professors and others with interest and expertise.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has posted on its website the "blueprints" for the new tests, telling teachers what standards are the basis for test questions. There are also sample practice questions so that students can familiarize themselves with the format of the tests.
The practice tests are available on altlasportal.org.
"This isn't a national assessment. It's not an off-the-shelf product. This is an assessment that is built and designed to measure the standards on how students are performing," Oliva said.
The checks on student achievement include ATLAS end-of-course exams in algebra I, geometry and biology, which were used in one of the state's earlier testing systems -- ACTAAP -- but were not part of the more recent Aspire system.
Students in grades three through 10 will take the ATLAS tests in English/language arts. And students in grades three through 10 will take the math and science exams unless the upper-grade students are taking algebra I, geometry and/or biology courses. Those students will instead take the course-specific ATLAS tests in algebra I, geometry and/or biology.
One of the features of the ATLAS tests is that they are not timed tests, so students have the opportunity to take longer than the typical 30 to 45 minutes to complete the tests, Oliva said.
Additionally, the online tests are "adaptive," meaning that a student's response to a question determines the difficulty level of the next question -- easier or harder. If a student is doing better on questions, the student will get harder questions. If a student doesn't answer a question correctly, he or she will be given different prompts and asked different questions to give educators a more accurate picture of a student's knowledge or lack of knowledge.
CAMBIUM
Arkansas has contracted with Cambium Assessment Inc. for the ATLAS tests. Cambium's role is to provide the platform for delivering the tests, Oliva said.
Additionally, the company will help with validating the test questions -- or ensuring that the questions are an appropriate measure of the skills and knowledge desired for the state's students.
"We are required in federal law to have a fair and reliable assessment," Oliva said. "Cambium is going to make sure we meet those requirements."
Once all the exams are completed, the process calls for work groups of educators to assemble to analyze the raw test results and to set levels of what results are and are not satisfactory or unsatisfactory achievement. That will occur over this summer and into the fall. While state test results have typically been released in mid-summer, that release will be later in 2024 because of the need to set the performance levels.
Playing into the timeline are expected revisions to the state's A-to-F school grading system. The A to F grades are based on multiple factors, but largely on student achievement on the end-of-year tests, Oliva said. Those recommendations will have to go to the state Board of Education for approval.
"We want to make sure that when a school gets a grade, that there is confidence that the grade reflects the learning that is happening in that school," he said. "Right now, I don't know that we have strong enough confidence. If we can improve that, we want to take those steps."
Oliva said he anticipates that despite the use of a new testing system, there will be ways of gauging student achievement compared to past years. Such a measure will enable educators to identify students who need more support or those whose course work could be accelerated.
One of the purposes of standardized tests across the country has been to compare achievement in one state to achievement in other states or to a national sample of students. Oliva said Arkansas will rely on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP and the Nation's Report Card, to make those comparisons. That exam is given every two years in math and literacy to a representative sample of students in every state.
TEST HISTORY
In June 2015, Gov. Asa Hutchinson called for Arkansas public school students to take new state-mandated tests in 2015-16, the third set of state-required tests in as many years.
Hutchinson directed state education leaders to replace the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC exams, with tests for third through eighth grades and high school that were produced by ACT Inc., which is the same nonprofit company that produces the widely used college entrance exam.
The state administered the largely online PARCC tests -- which were developed by a coalition of a dozen states and the District of Columbia based on the Common Core State Standards -- to Arkansas students for the first and only time in the 2014-15 school year, to mixed reviews.
The PARCC tests replaced the Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course tests in math and literacy that were last given in 2013-14.
While many educators said the online PARCC testing program proceeded relatively smoothly and engaged students, there were also complaints that the testing, which was spread over two testing periods in early and late spring, diverted too much time away from regular instruction.