Results of this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness showed that 35% of students scored zero on the writing portion. The result comes in the wake of controversy over the use of computers to score the STAAR, including essays.
The STAAR tests Texas public school students at several points during their academic career. Scott Marion, executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, says Texas administrators should consider several factors as they work to understand why so many students scored poorly. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s start with the big questions. What are the possible explanations for why so many students in Texas scored a zero on this writing portion of the star test?
Scott Marion: It’s hard to say exactly why so many kids in Texas scored a zero. This might not make you feel any better, but this is a pattern we’ve been noticing across the country, and we think it’s due to a few factors.
It hasn’t just been happening this year. It’s just been going on and perhaps building a little bit post-pandemic. But we think that some of it has to do with some change in expectations that we’re asking of kids on writing.
Kids are being asked to compare and contrast different points of view from a pair of reading prompts or things like that, and where they have to actually cite evidence from the reading passages and where they have to actually explain their reason in a coherent way. So if they write something that’s what we say is completely off-task, they won’t get any points for that.
You also have kids just not engaging at all and just not writing anything, so they would get a zero for that. It’s rarely the case that they just don’t know the material or don’t know the techniques of how to analyze what’s being asked.
So it’s likely due to one of three things: motivation – and we see more of that post-pandemic. Are they being asked to demonstrate skills in writing that they’re not necessarily being taught about, you know, citing specific evidence and producing clear arguments and rationale?
And then, you could look at the scoring, but I think that’s a lost leader. I don’t think there’s really anything there with the ways in which the computer is scoring the test.
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So if you were in charge of Texas schools, which I know would be a big learning curve, but, you see a zero on 35% of these writing tests, what’s step one for improvement?
So I think that you have really good folks in the Texas Department of Education – TEA – and I think that they’re doing a lot of this now. So the first thing you want to look at is you don’t have to pull off 35%, but you could pull a good random or perhaps systematic sample and actually look at the papers with humans: Do the humans agree that this is completely off-task and worthy of a zero response? That’s like the low bar. That’s easy to do.
Now let’s say that’s the case. Then you have to now look at other things, and maybe it’s looking at what’s being asked of kids on these essays, and maybe pull together a sample or set of Texas educators, likely language arts teachers, and ask them, are these the kind of expectations that we’re asking on the STAAR, or are they similar to the expectations that you’re asking in your classroom assessments and other types of assessments that you’re doing locally? If they say no, these are completely different, then you have a bigger problem.
The other thing I would do: I would try to get to talk to a handful of kids who got these zeros, show them the the paper and ask them either why they didn’t write anything or why they wrote what they did. Those three strategies, I think, will give you a lot of information. And again, I know some the folks at TEA; I’m sure they’re undertaking at least most of those.
Editor’s note: We’ve replaced a photo with this story that implied student demographics for zero scores on the STAAR test, which are not included in this story.
