Robb- NWEA Assessment

Today was a very silly day in Kindergarten, just ask six of my Kindergarteners how funny it was to see Ms. Robb run around the room during a time when they were supposedly taking a “very serious assessment.” I had to laugh after today. This was the day when the fifth assessment administered to my Kindergarteners took place. The NWEA assessment was given via laptop and headphone set to the first six students on my attendance sheet today and it went, well, terribly.

            Now, I am not talking about the scores. These scores are the initial scores that the students’ final scores will be compared wat the end of the year. What went terribly about the test was, everything else. The NWEA reading assessment is supposed to take no longer than thirty minutes to complete, be “fairly self explanatory” and also be a “rolling” test, as in, if a student is getting many or all of their grade level’s questions correct, the test becomes harder and harder until the child starts to miss points.

            Many of my students have computers at home, but the majority of them use them for fun and games. The proctors (my MT and I) were instructed to give them very little assistance or prompting with their questions (which would all end up being different eventually anyways). Never haven taken a real standardized test before, this became very problematic very quickly. This was the first issue. I had one student who would first select the correct answer to a question, pause and then begin selecting the rest of his options and then hitting the “next question”. So, although he got the question right initially, he had no concept of how it needed to be submitted.

            Another student began scoring so well on his assessment that the questions started to increase so rapidly in level that he could not perform the tasks anymore. He began to get prompts to “Read this paragraph” and “select the best choice out of the following genres for a text about blah blah blah…”. Although this boy is incredibly smart, he cannot yet red nor formally write a full sentence, let alone a paragraph. He was frustrated and almost into tears until I came and sat next to him, told him that he was taking such a hard test because we knew he liked a challenge and that someday, he would know every answer, right off the bat. We laughed but it really hurt to see him so upset over something he should not really even have had to face.

            I did my best to help my students, and another round of six students will need help testing tomorrow, and then another and another until, in total, my MT and I will have lost 5 to 6 prep times to test the students on a test that is not even required by the district and will not go home in progress reports. I believe that the main draw for having all K-8 students take the NWEA, is that by the time that the NWEA actually matters (grade 3), they will be very familiar with the program. What I have learned from this experience is that, so far, it has not been worth it. I am upset to lose prep time that my MT and I need to set up Science for the end of the day lesson or to develop more of my Alphabet intervention lesson plans for a handful of my ELL learners.