An Overview of NAEP's Transition to Digitally Based Assessments

• In Event: 58.074 - Discussion and Demonstration of New Digitally Based Assessments for NAEP

Abstract

The world of pen and paper is slowly slipping away, as the world of digital technologies rises to prominence. We walk around with small computers in our pockets, work on computers all day long and get fast-food and music, digitally. The world we know is evolving, and a key part of that evolution is the education and the assessment of our children. Schools across the country rely more and more on technology to support, individualize, and extend instruction and assessments to better prepare students for post-secondary education and work experiences.

In order for NAEP to remain relevant and meaningful, its assessments must transition to keep up with trends in technology and instruction and assess children in the way they are learning. NAEP’s objective is not to merely transfer the existing assessment from pencil-and-paper to computer, but to explore and implement technologies and capabilities that reflect students’ experiences in school, and that allow us to measure knowledge and skills that could not have been assessed in large-scale settings before.

NAEP has dual goals during this transition: to maintain meaningful trends and leverage technology to improve and expand measurement to lead the field in innovation. While both goals may seem contradictory, a comprehensive and carefully designed approach has been adopted to increase the likelihood of meeting them. Performance trends have always been a unique and critical component of NAEP, and there is a strong commitment to preserving trends during the transition to digitally based assessments (DBA) because of the role they play in informing policy and education.

Shifting from pencil-and-paper assessment to DBA allows NAEP the opportunity to develop and incorporate more engaging, context-rich tasks and item formats into assessments. It will generate a wealth of data never collected before on the actions and processes students engage in solving problems and completing assessment tasks. DBA also allows NAEP to reflect contemporary learning conditions and measure emerging contexts that reflect the field’s attention to issues including content, complexity and cognition. This transition is characterized by careful rigor; a multi-step process that thoughtfully designs and implements each step in the transition from one mode to the other with the objective of preserving NAEP’s unique trend and allowing NAEP to step confidently into the digital world.

By conducting the transition to DBA in stages with a national startup in 2015, followed by the 2016 pilot study of innovative digitally based items and content, NAEP can conduct bridge studies to examine the impacts to NAEP’s trend data. During this symposium, we will share findings from the 2016 pilot studies in reading and mathematics, and discuss the lessons learned by NAEP as it continues to shift to DBA for all subjects.

Author

• Peggy G. Carr, National Center for Education Statistics/IES, U.S. Department of Education