Heather Campbell, Director of Education for the Rainy River District School Board thinks observers need to balance EQAO with in-class assessments to paint a full picture of student achievement.
“I think we need to balance the fact that we have large-scale assessments, but we also have at the school level and the classroom level and individually, we have assessments that occur all the time that are teacher-driven,” said Campbell. “When we talk about students and individual student achievement, that is best at the classroom level.”
The province recently released it s EQAO data. Students are categorized into four levels, based on the test, with level three and four considered “meeting” and ‘exceeding” the provincial standards, respectively.
According to Campbell, EQAO is a “snapshot” of system data, but on an individual level, it is considered “trailing data” compared to ongoing in-class assessments.
“It’s really important to know that a provincial assessment provides system data. It gives us a general snapshot of how our system is doing, but, as far as its ability to pinpoint what we need to do for specific students, it comes so much later in the year that by the time we receive the data, we’re already into a new school year,” said Campbell. “So, that’s why I call it lagging or trailing data.”
To Campbell, the most reliable information for parents and caregivers to assess how a student is doing ought to be the daily in-class assessments.
“I think that our teachers are the sources of that critical information about how each individual student is doing,” said Campbell.”They use multiple forms of assessments, including a student self-assessment to help drive learning, drive instruction, and to also report on how students are doing overall.”
Moreover, Campbell thinks comparing data from large-scale assessments like EQAO might reduce the reliability of that data.
“You have to be really careful. Sometimes people look to compare, and when you start to narrow down the focus, when you try to look at using comparison, using data from large scale assessments, the reliability of that data can decrease because those fine-grained terraces.”
Because of this, Campbell believes the data should be observed in tandem with classroom assessments for a more complete view of student achievement and gave an example to illustrate her reasoning.
“I gave the example of the board meeting, for instance, of the Ontario Secondary school literacy test. So, there were different boards across the two northern regions, the northwest, the Thunder Bay region, and the Sudbury North Bay region. What’s interesting to know is that you could see where we land as far as the percentage of students who are successful at that credentialing assessment. But, what you might not see is the number of students for some boards that they had higher results, they may have had a significantly higher deferral rate.”
Which, in Campbell’s mind, makes the data incomparable.
“[This] means that they said to a group of students, ‘You can wait for a bit. You’re not ready to write that yet.’ Or, I saw some school boards that had significant absenteeism for those assessments. So, there’s a large pool of students that didn’t even write it,” said Campbell. “You can’t really compare, because you don’t even know what the full picture of that board is.”
Lastly, Campbell encourages parents and caregivers to contact the student’s teachers about any concern a student might be having.
“I would always say to a parent that if you had concerns about your child’s achievement, the best place to go is speak to the classroom teacher,” said Campbell, “because they see your child every day, and they can assess them in different ways.”
“People look at a traditional pen and paper. We all use observation. We look at the processes, not just products, and that’s really important so that you can see the knowledge that’s there that may not come out in that one assessment, but it may be shown in multiple different ways throughout the course of a couple of weeks.”
“It’s really about having that assessment data, which helps teachers to drive their instruction and also helps them to focus in on what’s needed for those students.”
