North Dakota: Understanding Student Achievement Within State Assessment

Introduction

Within education, a direct relationship exists among standards, instruction, and assessment. Standards drive instruction, instruction fosters learning, and assessment measures understanding.

Standards identify what students should know and be able to do. Teachers craft instruction to facilitate student learning. Teachers assess students to determine what level of learning has occurred. Assessment results inform teachers where further instruction is required. Assessment results report student achievement in terms of expected learning goals, which in turn guide future curriculum and instruction improvement.

The practice of assessing or testing students is well established within classrooms. Teachers routinely teach and assess their students in terms of instructional goals. Assessment results become the basis for grading, promotion, and ultimately graduation.

Similarly, assessments are well established for use by the state. The North Dakota State Assessment measures all students’ achievement with a common tool using a standardized scoring scale. The State Assessment ensures that all students are included into a common accountability system and that all students have access to a comparable educational opportunity.

I. Legal Foundations for the North Dakota State Assessment

A. State Assurances for Comparable Education

The North Dakota constitution mandates that the Legislative Assembly ensure that all North Dakota citizens are literate and afforded an opportunity to receive a high-quality education. The Legislative Assembly has empowered local school boards with the duty to provide such educational opportunities to their residents. The Legislative Assembly provides foundational funding that forms the base for local and other supplemental funding sources to accomplish this educational mandate. Although school districts determine local instructional goals and implement their respective programming, the State retains an inherent constitutional responsibility to ensure comparable and equitable educational opportunities statewide.

It has been the long-standing practice of the State to administer annual assessments at specific grade levels as a means of monitoring overall student achievement levels. These student achievement results have been used to assure a school’s improvement activities required under State accreditation rules, to evidence fundamental civil rights compliance, and to identify schools for program improvement under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The North Dakota State Assessment assesses all students in designated grades within a single, unified, statewide assessment that measures students’ performance in terms of the state’s challenging content and achievement standards. Such an assessment strategy offers a means to measure student achievement and to assure that all students receive a comparable educational opportunity.

B. State Standards Assure Comparability

State academic standards provide school districts with a means to ensure that all students receive a comparable quality education. Common state standards offer greater assurances of comparable opportunities. To hold schools accountable for the educational services they offer, the state has developed, with the assistance of educators statewide, an assessment system that is designed to measure student performance in terms of these state standards. To ensure that the state’s accountability system engenders confidence among all constituents, the Department has established a system of prescribed activities, or protocols, that are designed to assure procedural validity and reliability, product quality, and systemic integrity. These protocols articulate the governing rules for the development of state academic standards and assessments. A state-level advisory committee consisting of local and state representatives, titled the Standards, Assessment, Learning and Teaching (SALT) Team, assists the Department regarding all state standards and assessment development.

North Dakota state law (NDCC 15.1-02-04.3) places responsibility for the development of state academic content standards with the State Superintendent. Content standards define what a student should know or be able to do at a given grade level. The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction has developed and adopted academic content standards in mathematics (reference these standards at http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/standard/content/math/math.pdf) and English language arts see at http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/standard/content/ELA/ELA.pdf).

State achievement standards complement the state content standards. Achievement standards identify what a proficient student should be able to demonstrate in knowledge and skills at a given grade level. The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction has developed and adopted academic achievement standards in mathematics and English language arts. These achievement standards are contained within the same document as the context standards at the same address.

The state content and achievement standards have been developed for grade Kindergarten through grade 12 in accordance with the North Dakota Standards and Assessment Development Protocols (see http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/standard/protocols.pdf.)These state content and achievement standards form the foundation for the State Assessment.

C. State Law Authorizes State Assessments Aligned to Standards

North Dakota state law (NDCC 15.1-21-08) places responsibility with the State Superintendent for the administration of state assessments that are aligned to the state’s content standards in reading and mathematics. Beginning in 2001-02, state law required that the assessments be administered to at least one grade level selected within each of the following grade spans: grades three through five; grades six through nine; and grades ten through twelve. In 2001-02, 2002-03, and 2003-04, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction developed and administered assessments at grades four, eight, and twelve to correspond with the state’s content standards.