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The amount of time Tennessee students spend taking state standardized tests next spring will increase significantly due to an additional writing test that won’t actually be scored.
Tennessee is adding an unscored field test writing subpart to the English Language Arts section of the 2027 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. It will increase total test time by more than an hour for older children and 40 minutes for lower grades.
Field testing is not unusual in standardized testing. Testing companies and administrators often use unscored prompts or questions as trials to determine their efficacy before using them on scored exams. Tennessee previously administered writing field tests at other times of the school year.
But some Tennessee teachers say they are concerned about adding a significant block of testing at the beginning of an already high-stake testing window next spring.
“I feel powerless at times because we see what these weeks of testing do to the kids,” said Chantel Kluemper, a middle school English teacher in Knox County. “The teachers really care about the kids. It’s not that we just don’t want to do tests. It’s that this couple of weeks is draining, and it’s hard to bolster motivation for kids.”
A Tennessee Department of Education spokesperson confirmed the state will add the writing field test during the 2027 TCAP and high school end-of-course exams.
“The state has always and will continue to field test items as a necessary component of constructing a valid, reliable test,” TDOE Director of Media Amanda Chin said. “We made small adjustments to the testing calendar to give schools more flexibility.”
For grades 6 and above, this means an additional 85 minutes in ELA testing. That brings the total ELA testing time for higher grades to 315 minutes.
Grades 4 and 5 will have an additional 80 minutes of testing time with the new field test.
Grade 3, which faces the high-stakes reading retention law, will now have six separate subparts in the ELA test with the additional 40-minute writing field test. Third graders will now take three separate writing subparts, all 40 minutes, in addition to three additional reading-focused subparts. In total, third graders will have 220 minutes of ELA testing next spring.
Tennessee requires schools administer the TCAP within a specific testing window, but it gives schools flexibility in how it spaces out subject subparts. One school could administer the six third grade subparts over just three days, or spread them out over five days.
TCAP ELA testing is scheduled for early April before the rest of the TCAP subject areas, meaning students will take the lengthy untimed writing test at the beginning of the TCAP testing window.
Kluemper said she believes standardized testing can be very beneficial for educators, particularly with assessments that provide real-time benchmarks to track student progress and tweak teaching strategies to directly align with what is working and what isn’t.
The TCAP scoring formula doesn’t provide individualized feedback for teachers, Kluemper said, in the way that district-led formative and summative assessments do.
“I don’t feel teachers feel good about this because it’s just more, more, more,” Kluemper said. “We don’t get information from TCAP that I think is genuinely beneficial and specific for us to know how we can do better, how we can teach that standard better.”
Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
