More writing, fewer bubbles: Changes coming for Texas’ STAAR exam. Here’s what to expect
When Texas students take annual state assessments this month, they’ll do more writing and fill in fewer bubbles. And, for the first time, nearly all of them will do it online.
This year marks the first year students will take the newly reformatted State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. The new exam contains more writing prompts and fewer multiple choice questions. In a change from previous years, it will also be given entirely online.
School leaders in the Fort Worth area say they’ve been preparing students and teachers for the new exam for months.
“We want to make sure that the assessment is assessing what they know, and not assessing their ability to navigate online testing,” said Marcey Sorensen, chief academic officer of the Fort Worth Independent School District.
Texas lawmakers called for STAAR redesign
In 2019, state lawmakers passed a bill directing state education officials to overhaul the exam by the 2022-23 school year. The biggest change was moving the exam online, with pencil-and-paper versions still being provided for students who have disabilities that prevent them from taking a web-based test and those who need accommodations that can’t be delivered online.
Among other changes, students can now expect to see passages in the reading section of the exam that deal with information they should have learned in their science and social studies classes. Another major change is a cap on the number of multiple choice questions. Now, no more than 75% of the questions will be multiple choice. The other 25% will be made up of more than a dozen new types of questions.
The new categories of questions will include constructed response questions, in which students will be asked to write a few sentences in response to a prompt, “hot text” questions that ask students to cite evidence by highlighting lines in a paragraph and multiple choice questions in which students may select more than one correct answer. In math, students might enter their answers in the form of fractions or equations or draw lines and points on a graph.
Lily Laux, deputy commissioner of school programs for the Texas Education Agency, said those changes are intended to make the exam look more like the instruction students get in the classroom. Students typically see short answer writing prompts like the ones they’ll see on the STAAR in classroom assignments and tests throughout the year, she said.
Besides being better aligned with what students see in the rest of the year, those writing prompts also give students a better opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge than a series of multiple choice questions does, Laux said. And unlike multiple-choice questions, more open-ended writing questions allow for students to receive partial credit when they understand part of a concept but not the entire thing, she said.
Despite the format overhaul, Laux said this year’s exam will be at a comparable level of difficulty to those students have taken in years past. That means education leaders should still be able to look at this year’s results in comparison with last year’s and draw conclusions about the direction districts are headed, she said.
Fort Worth ISD curriculum changes mirror STAAR reformat
Sorensen, the Fort Worth school district official, said the shift to online testing is a big change for the district. The district has shifted some of its assessments online over the past two years in an effort to get kids more comfortable with online testing, she said. Older students generally know how to work on computers without a problem, she said, but district leaders are a bit more worried about students in earlier grades who have had less exposure to online tools.
Sorensen said the shift to fewer multiple choice questions is a good idea. The new exam requires students to explain their thinking, cite evidence and show their work in ways that aren’t possible on a multiple choice test, she said. The new questions may make for a more complex test-taking experience, she said, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“We want to see our kids be able to respond to complexity,” she said. “We want to see our kids be able to respond to rigor.”
The changes in question styles mirror curriculum changes the district has made over the past few years. In reading, the district adopted an instructional framework that focuses on explicit phonics instruction and maximizes the time for teachers to work directly with students on literacy. In math, the district recently adopted a pair of new curricula that place more of an emphasis on conceptual learning over drilling and memorization.
While the district didn’t make those changes in response to the STAAR redesign, Sorensen said they brought the district in closer alignment with the new format. Although district leaders hope the benefits of those instructional changes show up as higher test scores, she acknowledged it’s hard to know whether that will happen the first time students see the new test.
Crowley moved STAAR online in 2021
Nicholas Keith, chief academic officer for the Crowley school district, said the district made the shift to all-online testing in 2021. Because of lingering disruptions created by the pandemic, state education officials suspended accountability measures tied to test results that year and paused A-F ratings for districts and campuses. That temporary change gave the district the opportunity to make the shift at a time when there would be fewer risks if it didn’t go smoothly, Keith said.
The shift to all-online testing was a big undertaking, Keith said. The district had to stress test its network to make sure it would be able to support thousands of students taking the test at once. Officials had to make sure they had enough internet-enabled devices on hand and then rearrange testing schedules so that every student who needed a device had one, he said.
Last spring, the district convened a committee of teachers, administrators, curriculum specialists and others to figure out how to prepare teachers and students for the redesigned state test, Keith said. At the committee’s recommendation, the district made a wide range of changes, including updating its curriculum, buying materials to give students more practice with online exams and updating the district’s assessments to look more like the redesigned state test, he said.
“We tried to attack it from every angle possible,” Keith said.
Although he said the district is in a good position, he doubts any district in the state is fully ready for the redesigned exam. It’s hard to know which format changes will trip students up the most, he said. But school leaders across the state will be able to learn from their first time administering the test and use those lessons to prepare in the future, he said.
Assessment experts worry about test consistency
Test designers tend to get anxious about even the smallest changes, even those as minor as moving one question from the beginning of the test to the end, said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit that studies state testing and accountability practices. A big part of the reason states have annual assessments is to find out whether student achievement is improving or declining. It’s difficult to do that if the test isn’t comparable from one year to the next, he said, and even minor changes can make a difference in how the question is presented.
Even when states change their testing formats, there are ways they can ensure that the new tests are more or less comparable with the old ones, Marion said. One way of doing that is to carry over a subset of questions from the old exam to the new one, he said. That way, evaluators can still look at that subset of questions and get an idea of what student achievement looks like over several years, he said.
Although he said the move to an online format is a good thing overall — and he congratulated Texas for “joining the 21st century” — Marion acknowledged the change isn’t without risks. When Texas moved portions of the exam online in 2021, outages disrupted testing in many districts across the state, including Fort Worth. About 200,000 students across the state were kicked out of online testing and unable to log back in.
Marion said assessment companies should do system tests before the testing window arrives to make sure those kinds of disruptions don’t happen. But if they do, Marion said research suggests that minor technical issues don’t have a huge effect on testing outcomes. If testing is delayed by a few hours, students aren’t usually overly concerned, and teachers generally do a good job of minimizing the disruption, he said.
Schools will give the first round of STAAR tests April 18-28, with subsequent rounds being given later in the month.
This story was originally published April 4, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
