NEWS

Shorter ISTEP likely for spring 2016

Kris Turner
kris.turner@indystar.com

The Indiana Department of Education projects that the spring 2016 ISTEP exam will be a minimum of five hours and 45 minutes and as long as eight-and-a-half hours.

The statewide exam ballooned to 12 hours last year, creating a panic among parents, teachers and school administrators. The test was eventually shortened to nine hours in a last-minute compromise.

Local school administrators were pleased with the length of this year’s test but said it still isn’t perfect. Less testing is always easier on the teachers and students, they said.

“Of course, we’d always like it to be less, but that sounds like it’s more reasonable than what they started with last year,” said Jim Snapp, superintendent of the Brownsburg Community School Corp. “It certainly is a step in the right direction.”

Less testing means one thing: more time for valuable classroom instruction, said Wanda Legrand, Indianapolis Public Schools’ deputy superintendent for academics. Schools always are happy to see shorter exams, she said.

The ISTEP includes a mandatory math and English portion for students in grades 3 through 8. Those exams run a total of five hours and 45 minutes. The science exam — required for students in grades 4 and 6 — is expected to be one hour and 45 minutes. The social studies portion, which is administered to children in grades 5 and 7, is one hour and 36 minutes.

High school sophomores will take the longest ISTEP, which is eight hours and 30 minutes. The test includes English, math and science portions.

It’s unclear whether Indiana’s test is longer or shorter than other states, because a comprehensive survey of state-mandated tests hasn’t been compiled, said Monty Neill, a national testing expert with The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which works to end the misuse and flaws in standardized testing.

“The data on that is really pretty murky,” he said. “I don’t frankly think anybody has a real good handle on it and part of the problem is the amount of testing really varies greatly.”

Paul Kaiser, superintendent of Beech Grove Community Schools, said the shortening of the ISTEP from last year is an improvement, but more needs to be done to ensure the test is effective.

“ISTEP is not a growth-measuring test. It truly doesn’t measure student growth,” he said. “You cannot measure growth from one year to the next based on one test in the spring.”

Kaiser said the state should administer three short tests — one at the beginning of the year, an exam around the holidays and a final test in the spring — to assess whether students actually made progress through the year. The ISTEP can’t show that, he said.

Beech Grove tests its students three times a year to see what they’ve learned, Kaiser said.

“Taking a test in the spring that we still don’t have the results back from or the data we need doesn’t do us a whole lot of good trying to design instruction for kids this fall,” he said, noting that districts aren’t expected to know how their students did on last year’s ISTEP until December or January.

Issues with CTB-McGraw/Hill, last year’s vendor of the ISTEP exam, have delayed the scoring process. The state selected Pearson Education Inc. in March to administer the test.

Pearson, which has been working with the Indiana Department of Education and CTB-McGraw/Hill to take over the administration of the ISTEP, said testing should go off without a hitch in the spring.

Cari Whicker, a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and a teacher at Riverview Middle School in Huntington, said she’s elated the test is shorter but wants to make sure the ISTEP is ready for students by the spring.

“It’s not just the length of the test, but the test itself,” she said. “Is it going to be ready?”

Call Star reporter Kris Turner at (317) 444-6047. Follow him on Twitter: @krisnturner.

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