Each fall, in the midst of the chaos that inevitably marks the first few weeks, schools scramble to get students to complete their first progress monitoring assessment. The instinct of many teachers and administrators is to get students into the computer lab for testing as soon as possible. “We have to figure out what they don’t know, so we know where to begin” is a common refrain. And soon thereafter, we hear, “Our students came in so low this year. We still have a lot of learning loss to make up.”
The potential peril in assessing students immediately upon their return to campus is the results are likely to be too low. Meaning, they are not representative of true ability.
We see evidence of this when we compare the percentile rankings of students in the spring of the prior school year to those of the same cohort at the beginning of the fall term. It’s not uncommon to observe drops of 15, 30, even 50 percentile points in that 3- to 4-month window, which, barring brain injury or extraordinarily large standard error of measurement, is unlikely to represent real “learning loss.” There is something else at play here. Consider this analogy—
When a runner takes several months off, they don’t forget how to run or become incapable of running, but their first time out will certainly be slower and sloppier. Muscle memory needs to be activated and lung capacity renewed with time and practice.
The same is true for learning. The mind is a muscle that needs to be warmed up.
Before diagnosing what students know and are able to do, if you have the flexibility in your testing window, try to give students time (2-3 weeks, at least) to get used to their new learning environment, and to get to know and trust their teachers. Give them opportunity to be exposed to and grapple with grade-level standards, to fire up their synapses and retrieve prior knowledge. Help them understand why the assessment is important to take seriously—because it will help their teachers best meet their learning needs.
If your students have been, or will be, tested immediately upon return to school, consider the possibility their scores are lower than their true abilities. Request access to their assessment records and course grades from the prior two years and look to see whether the first diagnostic this year appears to be an outlier. Monitor the auto-learning path set for students during online instruction time (this path is typically determined by the students’ most recent diagnostic results) to make sure it is adequately challenging. Trust your instincts if you see that students are bored or disengaged – it could mean they need more depth.
Don’t let the assumption of learning loss become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To learn how K12 Lift can help your teachers interpret their progress monitoring data more powerfully, click here to contact us.
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