July 14 summit draws more than 100 educators to learn more about NWEA assessment tools

Assistant District Superintendent for Instruction Kathryn Gerbino addresses the crowd at the NWEA Summit July 14.

John Cronin, PhD, director of the Kingsbury Center at NWEA, presents research at the NWEA Summit July 14.

As student and teacher evaluation methods continue to rapidly change in New York State, the region’s public schools need tools and insights that can help schools close academic achievement gaps while assessing the effectiveness of their teachers from every possible angle.

Capital Region BOCES is the first in the state to partner with a non-profit organization the BOCES instructional services team believes will empower the region’s educators with the very tools and insights they need.

On July 14, Capital Region BOCES hosted the “NWEA New York Assessment Summit,” one of several summits being hosted by BOCES across the state, to help empower school leaders with insights about academic assessments and the use of data to close achievement gaps between students.

NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) is a global not-for-profit educational services organization based in Portland, Oregon. At the summit, NWEA research and content experts Dr. John Cronin, Director of the Kingsbury Center, and Josie Rodriguez, Director of Content, discussed growth data and teacher effectiveness, measuring and modeling growth in high-stakes environments, MAP assessments and the transition to the state’s Common Core standards, and assessment innovation “beyond multiple choice.”

Under newly enacted Common Core State Standards, school districts will evaluate student and teacher performance under two umbrellas: how students do on state tests, and through local evaluation. BOCES hopes to offer school districts NWEA assessment tools for the purpose of conducting local evaluations.

“By using NWEA’s research and assessment tools and undergoing the organization’s rigorous training standards, our instructional services staff can provide the region’s school districts with a very robust complement to mandated state assessments and teacher evaluation methods already in place,” said April Prestipino, educational data coach and analyst coordinator for BOCES.

Assessing students

NWEA’s student assessment tool is a computer-based program that evaluates a student’s proficiency in a given subject by first giving the student a question based on his or her grade level. If the student answers correctly, the next question will be harder. Likewise, the program will continue to give the students questions with varying difficulty levels, based on how the student answers.

“It’s not the kind of test you’d give a student for curriculum mapping or progress monitoring,” Prestipino explained. “It’s literally a gap awareness. It tells you where the student is on any particular concept, so a teacher knows how, and on what level, to begin teaching that student – or if the student even needs to be taught that concept at all.”

The program is able to ask students a wide variety of questions, all researched and written by NWEA researchers, who have digested New York State’s learning standards, and many of whom were involved in the crafting of the state’s new Common Core learning standards.

Question difficulty ranges from Pre-Kindergarten to the second year of college, which means teachers can receive a much clearer picture of a student’s true capabilities. State assessments typically do not evaluate a student’s knowledge beyond their current grade level.

Further, the NWEA assessment asks students seven to nine different questions within each content area, giving teachers a much deeper understanding of that student’s knowledge level of the subject matter. State assessments typically ask one to two questions in each content area.
In addition, questions are linked to each student’s individual identification number, meaning the computer program can automatically make sure the student is never asked the same question twice.

Assessing teachers

With this deeper understanding of each student’s capabilities, teachers can more meaningully adjust their instruction to ensure each student excels at his or her own pace.

“By knowing where a student is on any given concept, the teacher knows where to start, where to challenge a student – as well as whether or not the student even needs instruction,” Prestipino said.

Next steps

The NWEA assessment model is awaiting approval from the State Education Department as an acceptable tool school districts may use for local evaluation.

“We truly believe access to this suite of tools will help improve the speed of achievement gap closing at the classroom and district levels,” says Kathryn Gerbino, BOCES assistant district superintendent for instruction. “We believe in this product and we certainly appreciate the rigorous training process NWEA is putting us through to properly offer it to our local schools.”

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