Performance Level Indicators

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

We're never going to have perfect tests, but that wouldn't matter too 
much if not for the high stakes attached to the tests, a point made 
by Robert Linn many years ago and never, to my knowledge, refuted 
by  anyone. The one thing we can't do with STAR test results in most 
cases is use them to plan better instruction. When one of two test 
items assessing student mastery of an academic content standard is 
hopelessly flawed, the information about program strengths and 
weaknesses extrapolated from test results is likely to be helpful 
only at or near the level of chance.

Unfortunately, the California State Board of Education has been for 
several months considering a plan to give added weight to test 
results by adopting "Performance Level Indicators." These would be 
statements of what students who are "Proficient," "Advanced," "Basic" 
and "Below Basic" can do, based on the test questions that students 
at one level answer successfully and students at a lower level do not 
answer successfully. State adoption of Performance Level Indicators 
would encourage schools to focus on these skills. In a blatant 
example of curriculum narrowing, Performance Level Descriptors would 
direct attention to a subset of the subset of standards that are 
currently measured by the state's multiple choice tests.

The theory of standards-based instruction is that the state has 
identified academic content standards and has adopted a test designed 
to measure whether students are mastering this content at the 
appropriate level. Schools are then supposed to identify gaps in 
their programs in order to help all students meet the standards. The 
Performance Level Descriptors would tend to turn that process on its 
head. By identifying what students who score well on tests know that 
other students do not, the PLDs would constitute de facto curriculum 
objectives - a kind of norm-referenced decision-making.


George Sheridan