TENNESSEE’S TRANSITION
TO COLLEGE AND CAREER
READY ASSESSMENTS
OVERVIEW:
With the launch of the Tennessee Diploma Project in 2008 and
the General Assembly’s passage of the First to the Top Act
in 2010, Tennessee has prioritized and invested in efforts to
ensure that Tennessee students graduate from high school
prepared for college and the workforce. These efforts include a
transition to a set of college and career ready academic standards in English language arts and math that support higher expectations for student learning across the state. While
academic standards set expectations about what students
should know and be able to do, assessments make those expectations concrete, establishing how students demonstrate
what they know and can do. Without an aligned assessment, it
is difficult to gauge student progress on academic standards,
leaving teachers without the information they need to guide
their instruction and effectively meet student needs. To ensure students in Tennessee are progressing toward college
and career readiness, a high-quality assessment, aligned to
Tennessee’s State Standards must be in place.20
High-quality assessments should guide the instruction of
teachers, help students and parents to measure student
progress on standards, and support students’ development
of the skills and competencies the workforce demands.21 To
do so, assessments not only need to cover the standards
taught in classrooms, but also need to do so at the right level
of difficulty. In order to be well-aligned, assessments should
cover the full range of standards, which includes skills that
are traditionally hard to measure such as writing, listening,
and speaking. Assessments should also cover standards at
the level of rigor, or cognitive demand, required by the standards. For example, if a standard requires students to be
able to solve a mathematics problem using different strategies and to explain each strategy used, the assessment task
has to match that standard. A multiple choice test item may
not capture the required cognitive demand of this standard,
whereas an open-ended response might.
12
Recent research on other states’ assessments calls into
question whether the many assessments used over the last
decade accurately measure student mastery of academic
standards.22 This research found gaps in alignment between
states’ academic standards and standardized assessments,
both in terms of content and rigor.23 These analyses found
that on average, less than 60 percent of the content found on
state assessments was aligned with the expectations set in
states’ grade-level standards.24 Additionally, these analyses
found that 15 percent of items in English language arts and
26 percent of items in math were less rigorous than the academic standards and were therefore not an accurate measure
of learning.25
If a t