Wyoming schools online testing via Pearson a debacle. Back to paper testing.

[madfloridian]

Online testing debacle in Wyoming provides a warning to other states

Quote:Technical problems erupted as soon as Wyoming switched to online testing in 2010. Students were unable to submit their tests after spending hours taking them. At times the questions wouldn’t load on the screen. And ultimately the scores were deemed unreliable.

“We had so many poor kids who had to take the test again,” said Gordon Knopp, technology director of Laramie County School District No. 1, the largest school district in Wyoming.

Online testing was such a debacle that voters threw the state superintendent of education out of office and the state sued Pearson, the company hired to administer the test. (The state reached a $5 million settlement with Pearson, but the outgoing governor decided not to sign it and obligate his successor to the deal.) The state went back to old-fashioned paper, which it still uses.

...."Instead, The network infrastructure collapsed under the weight of more than 80,000 public school students. Knopp explained that there were two cyber traffic jams. The first was that every school was routed through a single pipe to the Wyoming Department of Education. The Department of Education and Pearson had decided to control the raw test data through a single, private network.

And it seems like someone in authority could have foreseen things just like this beforehand...."to prevent students from, say, searching for the answer on Google during a test, all the computers would need to be manually “locked out” one by one and used exclusively for testing."

There is an interesting article at the Washington Post about the online "testing revolution."

Online testing revolution comes to schools

Quote:TOWNSEND, Del. — On a recent afternoon at Townsend Elementary School here, a little boy squinted at a computer screen and gripped his mouse. He was stuck. Half of the screen contained an article about rain forests. The other half was filled with questions, some multiple-choice, some not.

One question asked the boy to pick two animals that belonged in the rain forest from a list of pictures and written descriptions. Then he was supposed to drag the animals across the screen onto the rain forest background. Next, he had to move two correct descriptions of rain forest characteristics into boxes. He raised his hand.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered to his fourth-grade teacher.

“Read the directions again,” she whispered back.

There has been much money behind the push for online learning and testing. Many companies benefit. A test like this grades not only knowledge of the subject, but it also tests computer skills. I don't see how you can get a good reading that way.

Students, especially younger ones, who are not used to computers would most certainly have problems with this type of thing. Many do not have computers at home and have not had class time to be comfortable with such drag and drop skills.

The article points out that with online testing schools can give standardized tests four times a year instead of just twice. I am not sure that is an advantage. We used to give various weekly tests on our own as teachers, used a grade book to record. It seems classroom grades don't count that much anymore under the new reforms.

The statement is also made that when Pearson rolled out the online tests in 2007 about 10,000 students were unable to complete the exam.

Sounds like many of the same problems occurred in Wyoming five years later.

[xedniw]

Not a surprise.

Sigh.