The End of Paper-and-Pencil Exams?
In a recent pilot program, kids as young as 9 were asked to respond to online prompts and type out essays on a computer.
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Are fourth graders computer-savvy enough to have their writing skills measured in an online assessment? A new federal study suggests that they are, although it’s not clear whether old-fashioned paper and pencil exams might still yield useful results.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” is administered every two years to a representative sampling of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Because each state uses its own mix of assessments, NAEP (along with the SAT and ACT college entrance exams) is one of the few ways of making comparisons nationally on student performance. NAEP expects to be a fully online assessment by 2017.
In preparation for that shift, the National Center on Education Statistics tested an early version of an online writing assessment on 60 fourth graders to gauge their comfort level with the platform and design. After identifying common issues that students were struggling with, the pilot online writing assessment was eventually redesigned. Among the changes: swapping out a drop-down menu for icons, and giving students more frequent – and shorter – prompts. That assessment was then administered to 13,000 fourth graders.
Students were asked to respond to prompts that required one of three modes of writing:
- Persuade: Write a letter to your principal, giving reasons and examples why a particular school mascot should be chosen.
- Explain: Write in a way that will help the reader understand what lunchtime is like during the school day.
- Convey: While you were asleep, you were somehow transported to a sidewalk underneath the Eiffel Tower. Write what happens when you wake up there.
Because it was not a representative sampling, NCES has cautioned against drawing conclusions about the online assessment, or the students’ performance.
With that caveat, here are a few of the findings from the pilot study:
- On a scale of 1 to 6, just over 60 percent of students scored a 3 or higher on the assessment. NAEP officials say that means “the majority of students wrote enough to be assessed, included ideas that were mostly on topic and used simple organizational strategies in most of their writing.”
- Students scored higher when they had more time – 30 minutes vs. 20 minutes – to construct their responses.
- Nearly all students – 92 percent – said they had previously taken some form of an online assessment.
While this may only have been a pilot study, it’s clear that many of the students The End of Paper-and-Pencil Exams? - The Atlantic:
