Before we left on our long spring break vacation, we had the opportunity to give Smarter Balanced assessments at our school. It was an interesting process watching how the kids and adults deal with the testing, the technology and the testing environment. Being a homeschool charter, it's also an extra challenge to communicate with families that there are mandatory requirements and no opportunity to change the schedule. This is a difficult message for homeschoolers, as 99% of the time we live and breathe by the schedule of our children, not the school. When testing and school requirements sneak up, we have to flip flop everything around and make sure we are present. This is not an easy feat with kids that are used to doing math in their PJs!
Particularly fascinating to me was the huge range of technical skills our kids had going into the test. We were testing 3rd through 8th graders, so each of these kids was born post-iPod. Many of them sat down at their brand new Chromebook and began touching the monitor, trying to get the non-existent touch screen to work. Chromebooks are small and look more like a tablet with a docked keyboard, than a laptop. It was easy to see why they were puzzled!
We saw others frustrated by the lack of a right click on their mice in the Mac computer lab and just a few who were unsure how to use a Mac at all. We had other kids challenged by the use of the trackpad. Overall, the testing went smoothly and we had very few technical issues that couldn't be overcome by a few short clicks or a reboot. It was a successful test of our system, by all accounts.
However, what I noticed more than the success was the underlying annoyance of the students, particularly our 5th graders and up. They found the test to be cumbersome, poorly formatted and generally not user-friendly. They didn't like multiple scrolling windows on one screen with some funky options for highlighting and dropping and dragging. They wanted a searchable help menu or a wiki for commands, not some ridiculously long screen to read. They rolled their eyes, groaned and growled at the test frequently- and this had nothing to do with the content.
In the land of digital natives, students want multiple ways to give input to a computer and expect the tool to adapt to their needs, not the other way around. If they need to drag and drop something, they don't want to do it with a trackpad- they want to reach up and use their fingers. They expect a computer to respond quickly and accurately and are frustrated by slow websites. The older kids, particularly our 7th and 8th graders, expect a fully adaptive test where they don't have to prove repeatedly that they understand a concept. They want to prove it and move on and feel insulted when the test asks them, yet again, to do the same type of problem.
Most of all, I felt like the SBAC test designers forgot to reach out to the kids. In the land of digital natives, you should have children on your beta and QA teams. Let THEM tell you what's broken, what's not user-friendly and what you're expecting to happen in comparison to what actually does. It's time for the generation before me, the ones still running the world, to accept that without the kids, you have no product. They're the digital natives, who grew up with more computing power in their pockets and backpacks than the generation of the Vietnam War could even imagine would be possible at age 10.
Next time, give the kids half the test questions and spend the other half of the time letting them answer a survey about the test, running a focus group discussion or watching their actual behavior, not their scores. Or better yet, hire a group of 12 year olds to run your entire beta testing. I can promise you'd receive better results about not only the type of questions but the layout and setup of the test!
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