TEA Releases the HB 3 STAAR Readability Study – Part 1
TSA members will recall that HB 3 required TEA to issue an MOU to a public institution of higher education to study grades 3-8 STAAR used in 2018-2019 and to be used in 2019-2020.
Specifically, the study is to examine whether the STAAR:
- Is written at an appropriate reading level for students in that grade level
- Only includes content aligned with the TEKS for that or earlier grades
- Only includes passages written at the reading level or below for the grade level assessment
In August, TEA awarded the MOU to The University of Texas at Austin / The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk; and last month, Commissioner Morath explained to the SBOE that the results of the study “will be delivered in two parts due to the time needed to develop the new tests for 2019-20.”
Part 1, which was released by TEA last night and is attached to this article, is the final report on the 2018-2019 STAAR tests; and Part 2 the final report on the 2019-20 STAAR tests, will be delivered by February 1,2020.
Summary of Findings
Realizing that the UT Austin / Meadows Center researchers did not have much time to work on the study… here is a summary of the report findings.
Task 1: Content Alignment Study. Across all grades and subject areas, the overwhelming majority of items were rated as aligned to the content standards and aligned with the TEKS content standards for the grade level tested.
Task 2: Item Readability Study (evaluating the readability of test items) . “Because we do not have confidence in these results, we were forced to conclude that analyzing item readability in a reliable manner for this report is not possible.” (Page 4.)
Task 3: Passage Readability Study. It’s important to note that for this study, STAAR passages were deemed “readable” if the results from two of the three selected indices (Flesch-Kincaid, syntactic simplicity, and narrativity) fell within one grade level above, within, or below the tested grade level. The researchers selected to use a Y or N to identify if the passage fell within one grade level above, within, or below the tested grade level, rather than display the numeric value for the indices. (See page 17 for details.)
Using this system of Y or N and 2 out of 3, the study reports that “Overall, 30 of the 35 passages (86%) fell within or below the grade band for the test’s grade level on two of the three indices when using the ELA norms for narrativity. All but one passage fell within or below the grade band for the test’s grade level when using the social studies norms for narrativity. In other words, 86% to 97% of passages met the criteria for readability as defined in this study.”