Colorado among 14 states to begin field testing new assessments Monday

Colorado students at more than 400 schools will be among thousands across the nation that will take part in the trial run of new standardized tests beginning Monday.

And officials behind the tests, which will be used in more than a dozen states, are expecting there to be plenty of hurdles, hiccups, snags and snafus. But that’s the point of the trial run, they said during a conference call with reporters Thursday.

The aim of the pilot tests here and in the 13 other states apart of the coalition that developed the standardized tests, known as PARCC, is to work out any technological mishaps and to gauge the quality of the test questions, officials said. Those who designed the test, including teachers and instructional leaders across the country, want to make sure the questions are fair and accurately measure what students know.

“It’s my hope that when glitches arise — and they are inevitable — we don’t immediately assume things aren’t going well,” said Mitchell Chester, the Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education and chair of the governing board that is developing the tests.

Colorado is one of the 14 states participating in the development and execution of new standardized tests that will be used next spring. Most students will take the PARCC tests on computers and mobile devices in lieu of the paper-and-pencil TCAPs. The tests are supposed to measure student knowledge against the Colorado Academic Standards, which are based in large part on the Common Core State Standards that have been adopted by 45 states.

The state also uses several years of testing data to measure student growth, or how much a student learned from year-to-year compared to their academic peers. That information factors heavily into school and district accountability measures.

Colorado schools have been putting those new standards into effect this year at various paces. And several districts have raised concerns that their technological infrastructure could be maxed out during testing time periods.

Most of the Colorado schools and districts participating in the trial run were identified by officials at PARCC, said Joyce Zurkowski, the executive director of assessments for the Colorado Department of Education, in a separate interview. But whether they participated was left up to local leaders.

She said the department hopes to learn how it will best be able to support districts when most students begin taking the new exams next spring.

No student, school or district data collected from the field study will be released, officials said. However, the PARCC governing board is expected to release several findings including how comparable the paper-and-pencil is to its digital counterpart.