×

Wood County Schools official praises state testing change

PARKERSBURG — A Wood County Schools official says recent state changes to standardized testing will remove some of the burden on high school teachers.

Curriculum Director Christie Willis said the state Board of Education last week voted to stop using the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and has discontinued state testing in math and English/language arts for students in grades 9 and 10. The General Summative Assessment, which is in its third year, is administered in the spring.

“The federal government only requires us to test one grade level in high school, so that is going to be 11th-grade,” she said.

Willis said the state has kept 10th-grade science testing in place, but will shift test schedules for elementary and middle schools.

“Traditionally, grades 4, 6 and 10 have been tested in science, but now the testing comes at the end of programatic levels,” she said. “The federal government requires you to test once for each program, so now it’s grades 5 and 8, and the 10th-grade science testing remains.”

Willis said changes to the state’s standardized testing schedule do not affect all of the regular testing and monitoring the school system does to monitor student performance, but rather takes away some of what teachers in the past have seen as unnecessary testing.

“For the larger high schools, it’s going to alleviate a lot of scheduling issues,” she said. “It’s a computer-based test, so if you use laptops you have bandwidth issues. If you use desktops, it’s a computer lab issue. Without the test, it’s less disruptive to the school.”

In addition, Willis said, the Smarter Balanced exam was never intended for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

“It was written for 11th-grade,” she said. “In grades 9 and 10 it was not an accurate depiction of what the students were learning. The right thing to do was to eliminate the test.”

NEWSLETTER

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today