Evaluate 1.1.3 The Summative Assessment Forum

I just worked on a design team to revise the Griffin-Spalding County SLO for 10th Grade English.
In order to revise this assessment, I first went to a training on the new GA Milestones assessments and learned about the need for student constructed response sections.  The following is my reflection on this process.

Validity: In order to make a valid assessment, I attended a workshop on GA Milestones and looked at the specific types of questions that will be asked.  For ELA there will be some multiple-choice of critical reading passages, followed by constructed student responses.  Therefore, I worked to include both with the SLO pre/post test.  The multiple-choice were already in existence from a previous draft of the SLO, but the constructed response were not valid with the GA Milestones Assessment.  Therefore, I used the GA Milestones rubric and exemplars to craft a more valid assessment.  For classroom practice, this means that teachers in my building will now need to work in alignment with the CCGPS and be sure to include short-constructed responses on a daily basis.

Reliability: In order to improve reliability of the SLO, I started with the GA Milestones rubric and simplified the grading expectations.  Instead of a 1-100 scale, I reduced the scoring to a 1-5 point system and then provided a conversion chart to a 100 scale.  This takes the subjectivity of having 100 possible categories and reduces the number of categories to 5, two of which are outliers: the not attempted, and exemplar category.  In this manner most scorers are generally left with three levels of scoring: not evident, emerging, and meets, with the not attempted and exemplar categories only being used for exceptional cases.    

Test Security: Because this was a county-level SLO, there were already strict security measures in place such as my not being able to discuss the assessment with any one else, and I cannot share it with students before the assessment is given.  Likewise, the use of constructed responses does help to limit the possibility of students merely copying answers from each other that are simply A, B, C, etc.  The eventual ideal would be to have this assessment online, and then have answers verified with a plagiarism checker such as turnitin.com.