Dive Brief:
- Looking to reduce pressure on students, some districts and states are dropping standardized testing, but Education Week reports that some education experts and psychometricians say that the move will reduce teaching time and make things worse for anxious students by elongating test periods.
- Texas has recently bucked its 35-year history of not timing tests in favor of instating deadlines; saying testing was taking too long.
- PARCC and Smarter Balanced are also divided; PARCC tests are timed while Smarter Balanced are not.
Dive Insight:
Last month, New York state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia called for state tests to abandon the practice of being timed. So far, the results in New York have been mixed. That's because timed tests are largely designed so that students can finish, with time to spare. Without a stop time, some test takers just keep meandering along. In Missouri, the state now uses untimed Smarter Balanced tests, which reportedly has relieved stress on students.
Massachusetts has also recently made a move similar to that of Texas; abandoning untimed tests for the timed PARCC exams. Jeff Wulfson, deputy commissioner of the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, says that the state has seen success with PARCC.
It's too soon to tell what the end result might be overall in terms of the correlation of untimed tests to lower student anxiety related to testing. Districts considering such a move may want to wait for science and research-based evaluations before making a change to a new timed or untimed format.
