How to Assess Equity Gaps, Widened by Distance Learning

How did we get here and what do we need to do?

For decades, educators have maintained a consistent model for tracking student progress. This model—which relied heavily on state assessments—was disrupted with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, not only are schools missing the critical data required to determine the educational needs of students, many districts have not yet determined a means to address the inevitable learning and equity gaps that have been widened by distance learning.

During this year’s virtual PowerSchool LIVE conference, Marnie Stockman, Ed.D., Education Solutions Director at PowerSchool, shared insights on this issue in her session, How to Address Equity Gaps Enhanced by Distance Learning. Stockman highlighted the fact that across the US, students began the 2020-2021 school year with an expectation of 70% learning gains in reading and only 50% in math. Whether your students are back in the classroom, learning virtually, or using a blended hybrid education model, districts need a plan on how to assess and address these gaps in equity, resources, and support. We’ll need to use data in new ways to be more efficient in our analysis and help students regain the learning opportunities they’ve missed. To get started, consider these three helpful strategies from Marnie Stockman’s session.

Fortunately, the majority of school districts collected valuable data from the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year through March. This data is valid and can be used to make some decisions to help students recover from the “COVID slide”, but many districts still have to come up with unique solutions to compensate for the lack of data from the end of the school year with the sudden shift to distance learning. Focusing on key standards in the following categories is crucial since we don’t have the luxury of assuming that we’ll have the breadth of data that may have been taken for granted in previous school years:

• Enduring content – This refers to the knowledge and skills needed for long term learning.
• Transferable content – This comprises all the process skills that are cross-curricular, like the Scientific Method, for example.

• Fundamental content – These skills are required to build upon to reach the next level of content.

Once we’ve determined which standards fall into these categories and how we can use them to inform teaching, we will have a clearer picture of what we need to achieve our desired results. Inevitably, learning gaps will affect some students more than others, and districts are using a variety of measures to ensure they’re identifying students most in need. Many school districts are taking advantage of Baseball Card reports in Performance Matters to identify those students based on data from previous years’ state assessment results, benchmark tests prior to last year’s Q3, and progress monitoring tools that were in place during the 2019-2020 school year.

No matter the tools, it’s important to look at student data, not only by individual students but by subgroup, as well. This view allows us to see if gaps have widened across the board for a particular subgroup while giving us a baseline to work from when creating diagnostic assessments.

Assessments are great for accountability, but the true value is in the data we collect. Currently, since the lack of data is the issue, we have to rethink assessments. First, assessments need to be analyzed farther back than simply the previous quarter or segment. Ideally, you’d want to go back to previous years. This change in assessment strategy requires input from both teachers and administrators and collaboration between the two groups. Keep these things in mind:

• Analyze assessment items to ensure you have a range of coverage across relevant standards and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK).
• Don’t hesitate to combine performance and interview-style assessment items across classroom activities and common assessments.
• Harmonize district-wide standards and rubrics. Remember, mastery is the goal.

It’s also important to note the key strengths of performance assessment tasks and interview assessment tasks.

Performance tasks:

• Allow multiple elements of content to be assessed.
• Allow work products to be reviewed across grade levels.
• Assess higher-order cognitive skills.

Interview tasks:

• Allow students’ thought processes and work effort to be seen.
• Can include personalized and dynamic content.
• Provide enhanced test security, like ensuring student work is their own.

Well-defined rubrics are key for interview tasks, as they can clearly pinpoint true mastery.

There is a great deal of research on quick formative checks—or short cycle assessments—that are designed to ensure students are headed in the right direction and allow us to make immediate adjustments to get students the instruction they need. Having access to robust student data is critical here, which is the value that Performance Matters brings to the table. The tool allows us to look at data from both the aggregate or subgroup perspective, but also by content standard and social-emotional learning checkpoints, and then home in on the next steps that will close those gaps and help students succeed. Keep these ideas in mind to get the most out of short cycle assessments:

• Data should be gathered and analyzed throughout the year—weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.
• Teachers should be reviewing classroom data for their students, while administrators look into the same data at the school and district level.
• Use this data to make sure all students get the instruction they need to address equity gaps as they are discovered.