By Keith Whitcomb Jr. [email protected]
All schools in Vermont now have free access to a tool that can pair specific material in reading and math with an individual student’s skill level.
It was announced Thursday by Dan French, Vermont secretary of education, that the Agency of Education has a deal with a company called MetaMetrics that will give all school districts in the state access to the “Lexile and Quantile Frameworks” for reading and math.
Ted Fisher, a spokesman for the Agency of Education, said in an interview Monday that the MetaMetrics services Vermont is getting use scores from the Smarter Balance Assessment test, which students already take, so there’s no new testing involved.
“We are essentially offering the premium subscription level to all Vermont educators, and when that gets stood up, teachers will be able to register using their email,” Fisher said. Parents will have access to their children’s scores as well, which can help them keep their kids’ skills sharp over the summer breaks by helping them select learning materials like books.
Fisher said MetaMetrics takes the results of the Smarter Balance Assessment and assigns the student a score that can be used to select learning material, be it a book or math problems of a certain complexity.
Teachers will still need to be engaged in the process, sad Fisher.
“Say I’m an English teacher and I’m teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s a famous book, a classic, taught in a lot of schools,” said Fisher. “There’s a lot of themes, but Lexile doesn’t measure thematic content at all, so you could have an excellent reader and they’re reading well above their peers, and you want to challenge them and assign harder books, the teacher needs to still be engaged with that and make sure they’re not assigning a book that would be developmentally inappropriate for the child.”
Fisher said a teacher wanting to introduce the themes and ideas in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, could use this tool to find a book with those themes and ideas, but with text that’s less complex. The teacher could likewise find something with those same themes that’s a more difficult read.
It’s the same idea with math, Fisher said. Teachers can assign materials that’s at their students’ specific learning levels and work them up.
While the service is free to Vermont school districts, there is a cost. There’s a one-time start-up fee of $67,000 with an annual fee of $178,000. Fisher said this is paid for with federal money granted to Vermont, and while subsequent administrations will have the option to do away with it, the plan is to have it available from here on out.
Another benefit of the service is that the scores can be paired with other standardized tests, insulating the state somewhat against a loss of data continuity should the federal government require a new testing mechanism.
“We’re not expecting that we’re going to be losing or making a change from Smarter Balance anytime soon, but if that were to happen, if the federal government was to say again, you must use a different test, as they sometimes do, this is sort of a stable set of data,” said Fisher. “Our requirement, were we to change tests, would be that it be compatible with Lexile and Quantile, so we’d be able to have a continuity of data over time.”
He said while some districts already pay to use this service, many in Vermont don’t. The Agency of Education has been putting the word out to superintendents since Friday.
Jeanne Collins, superintendent of Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, said Monday she liked the idea of having a stable history of test scores to refer to. She heard about the MetaMetrics service at Vermont Superintendents Association meeting on Friday.
It appears to be a potential source of good data points that we can add to what we currently use to help make good instructional decisions for students and better align assessments and calibrate student assessment results.
Dave Younce, Superintendent of the Mill River Unified Union School District, said in an email Monday he likewise heard about it on Friday and while he doesn’t yet have a complete understanding of it, finds it interesting.
“All in all — I anticipate that it will likely be a good source of information and data for us to add to our toolboxes,” he wrote.
“We’ve heard from many educators and school districts asking for more tools to help students with reading and math skills,” said French in a release on Thursday. “And we know why: nearly half our young learners are scoring below proficient on the Smarter Balanced Assessment in Grades 3 and 4. We’ve been looking for a way to give Vermont educators increased ability to monitor the performance of students in reading and math skills and to provide targeted supports to help them improve.”
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