Norman's spring 2021 testing scores, reviewed Monday at an NPS Board of Education meeting, were down over years past but still above state averages in English language arts, math and science, Beth Albert told the board.
Albert, NPS' executive director of Professional Development and Student Achievement, said Friday that this year's test results should be analyzed cautiously, mostly because of student participation rates.
States generally have to test at least 95 percent of their students annually, but the federal Department of Education waived that requirement this spring due to the pandemic.
The department also said schools shouldn't bring students in just to test if students were "unable to attend school safely in person because of the pandemic."
The waiver brought some relief, Albert said, since just five of Norman's schools — Jackson, Lakeview, Madison, Monroe and Wilson elementaries — ended up reaching the 95 percent threshold.
The 95 percent number makes scores and results more reliable for analysis; when more students test, schools can more accurately draw actionable conclusions.
Data gathered by The Tulsa World on school site-specific test results shows that at three of the five sites that hit 95 percent student participation, test scores either improved from spring 2019 to spring 2021 or stayed about the same.
Without high enough participation rates, this year's testing data can't and shouldn't be used to draw too many conclusions on their own, administrators and an expert said.
It's not entirely possible to tell from this year's data whether lower scores only reflect decreased participation, or whether they show something meaningful about how students were able to academically progress in the pandemic, said Kristi Gray, NPS' director of Gifted Advanced Placement.
Michael Muenks is the associate director for implementation at ATLAS (Accessible Teaching, Learning and Assessment Systems), an Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas focused on designing and delivering standardized assessment, among other things.
Muenks said this year's lower scores likely reflect a combination of the stress of pandemic conditions and an abnormal year and a half of school.
He emphasized that the 2021 test results must be considered within the context of the pandemic.
"I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that we have to be very careful with the data we're looking at and not make black and white decisions from it, or very hard decisions, because the data has to really be contextualized and looked at within pandemic conditions," Muenks said.
PUTTING NUMBERS IN CONTEXT
Several NPS schools saw a decrease in scores for at least two of the testing subjects, if not all three. But administrators and experts said there's a number of factors to think about when contextualizing this year's scores.
Districts delivered the tests during a year when students and teachers were both in and out of the classroom on a moment's notice because of quarantine or infection.
"We have students coming in the building that are sitting in classrooms that, maybe they've never been in all school year, maybe we had to have primarily been virtual, come in and test," Gray said. "Where was their mindset at when they were taking that test? Were they really, with everything going on in the world, were they really able to show us their academic best?
"And so that's why we continue to say this is a data point — it's not the end all be all, it's something we're going to look at, but there's just so many things that we have to take into consideration when we look at those numbers."
Muenks said different schools were experiencing different school years, even within the same state.
Some rural schools saw the school year go on mostly as usual, he said, while other schools had people quarantine on and off according to their district or county's guidance.
"It's really hard to make a judgement given the conditions that were happening," Muenks said. "Performance may have been not as good on the state assessments, but those groups of kids were very different, and their educational experiences were very different given the context of the pandemic ... learning happened, and it was the best we could do."
Generally, standardized tests are a measure of accountability from schools to the public, Muenks said — they help communities see whether their public school districts are living up to their mission.
But they're just one measure of knowledge or ability, and represent "a snapshot" of how a student performed or what they could recall on one specific day, he said.
While standardized tests are helpful in a number of ways, they may not catch a student at their best, even during a "normal" school year, Muenks said.
"I think it's really very useful, at the school district level, for the public, because it really says 'are our public schools doing the job? Are they doing what we expect them to do?'" Muenks said. "I think at the student level, they're useful because they tell us what the student was able to show they knew how to do that day and what they know, but as every parent and educator knows, some kids have bad days. and those bad days can impact performance on an assessment that's just taking one day — we were all there, as people."
Standardized tests aren't given any specific weight in assessing a student — they're one piece of a bigger picture for NPS, Gray and Albert said. and academics aren't the only part of student life that's been affected by the pandemic, Albert said.
"You think about this being our third year that education has been disrupted due to this pandemic, and we've got some children that had not been in school for three years," she said. "And so we're having with, especially with our little ones, to work with them on what school looks like and how to behave appropriately in the classroom, because when behaviors aren't in check, it's really hard to teach academics."
Some in academic circles are concerned about "learning loss" from the last year and a half, but Muenks said he doesn't believe most students have regressed in their knowledge levels.
Students may not have learned as much as they're expected to during a "normal" school year, he said, but that doesn't mean they didn't continue learning the best they could last year.
MOVING FORWARD
With 2022's testing still months away, it's not fully clear how mid-pandemic learning will affect future tests.
Muenks said though tests results were released late this year in many places, he believes educators know their students and have been making "a Herculean effort" to fill gaps since the beginning of the school year, even without knowing test scores.
Gray said while the pandemic has given educators new tools and new situations to handle, teachers have always been used to helping students fill learning gaps.
"As educators, we encounter kids with academic gaps all the time," Gray said. "We know how to work with kids to get them back to where they need to be when they have gaps — this is not something new in our profession. and so we're really leaning on our expertise and the practice we already have in that."
Muenks said districts will likely see growth in the 2022 tests, but cautioned "it just may not necessarily look the way it has in the past."
In the meantime, Muenks said teachers, parents and students deserve grace and recognition for the way they've handled unprecedented learning conditions.
"I think everybody did the very best they could do given the situation that we were all in, and I think everyone should look at the data under that context and say 'we were doing the best we can and this data reflects what was happening on the ground in real time,'" he said.
©2021 The Norman Transcript (Norman, Okla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
