When evaluating the results of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, there is more to look at than just the percentage of students passing, area superintendents said.
The WASL score for each subject area and grade level is the percentage of students in a grade level who made above a 70 percent – or a C average – on each section of the test.
If a student doesn’t take the test, he or she is not excluded from the score, but totaled as a failing grade.
In the 10th grade tests, the score also doesn’t include students who passed the test as ninth-graders.
“What you don’t see is that everyone passed that took the assessment,” Crescent School District Superintendent Tom Anderson said.
“What you can’t tell is the students that didn’t take the writing and reading tests.
“But here, everyone [in the 10th grade] that took the reading and writing portions passed.”
When comparing from year-to-year, it is important to remember that it is a different test and there is a different set of children taking the tests, Sequim Superintendent Bill Bentley said.
“In some areas there was some trending down in the state,” he said.
“But we are not talking about ‘cohort data.’ “
Cohort data is comparing the same students to themselves, such as how seventh graders did their next year as eighth graders. It is not comparing how seventh-grade faired one year versus seventh-grade in another year.
When the Annual Yearly Progress list was developed in the late 1990s, WASL began to slowly include more grade levels where before it was only third, eighth and 10th grades.
Including the new grades will over time provide valuable data to the schools, Chimacum Superintendent Mike Blair said.
“We can compare the scores and look at things not only like how did our fourth-graders do but also how did our seventh-graders do as 10th graders several years later,” Blair said.
“We are evaluating that, too.”
Comparing the students to themselves in past years enables the districts to see if a particular test that was developed was poorly done, if a specific class has needs in different areas and which areas the district needs to work on.
Looking at the trends, schools can focus on the areas that are the weakest across the board.
After the first few years of the WASL’s implementation, schools statewide began an aggressive focus on literacy.
That focus has resulted in higher scores on the reading and writing portions of the test.
Math has improved somewhat, but is now a stronger focus of districts in the state.
The fourth test, science, is not required to graduate and is a relatively new test, Sequim Superintendent Bill Bentley said.
As the test develops the scores, which were statewide largely lower than 50 percent of students passing, will begin to improve.
“It is a very young test right now,” he said.
“As they mature, there are a couple things that happen: test developers get better at developing fair exams that can better test student knowledge, and school districts get better at understanding at what is on the test so students can be taught in the same ares in which they will be tested.
“I think there will be a trend in science over time,” Bently said.
“Right now, the scores don’t look a whole lot different than the other areas when we first tested them in the late ’90s.”
