Assessment/Accountability MCAS
Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System

MCAS Contract: 2010-2014

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) plays a central role in helping all of the stakeholders in our education system-students, parents, teachers, administrators, policy leaders, and the public-understand our successes and challenges in preparing students for higher education, work, and engaged citizenship.

As you may know, the Department procures the services of a contractor to assist in all facets of the MCAS program, including item and test development, production of test materials and test-related publications, administration (including support to schools), scoring, data and psychometric analyses, and reporting of results. The current contract, held by Measured Progress of Dover, NH, began on January 1, 2004, and will expire on December 31, 2008. This contract is being extended to December 31, 2009, in order to support a successful transition to a new contractor, in the event that this is necessary. The next contract will be for the period from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2014. I am writing to provide an update on the steps the Department is taking to rebid the MCAS contract, including our outreach to stakeholders and our exploration of options for alternative means of assessing what students know and are able to do.

Brief Overview of the MCAS Tests

MCAS tests are developed to align with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks content standards. The tests are composed of multiple-choice and constructed-response items; on average 40 percent of a student's total score is derived from the constructed-response items.

Under the close direction of the Department, the contractor is responsible for annually developing multiple forms of each content/grade-level test. Multiple forms are necessary in order to field test items for future tests and to provide access to accommodated forms (e.g., Braille, large-print) to students with disabilities. Over 400 unique test forms are developed and administered each year.

Outreach to Stakeholders:

This spring, Kit Viator, Director of Student Assessment, met with various stakeholders to solicit feedback on the current program and recommendations for changes for the future. The groups consulted this spring include the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, the Massachusetts Elementary School Principals Association, the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators' Association, and Mass Partners for Public Schools (which includes the associations listed above in addition to the American Federation of Teachers/MA, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Parent-Teacher Association, and the Massachusetts Association of School Committees). The Department is also currently collecting feedback from principals and superintendents through an online survey.

Based on all feedback collected to date, there appears to be overwhelming support for three major areas of improvement:

• more timely reporting of student results;
• reduction in the amount of testing time required for students; and
• reporting of student results that provide information on each student's progress from year to year.

We plan to include these as core features of the future program in the Request for Responses (RFR).

Other possible improvements and expansions, such as formative assessments, performance assessments, portfolio assessments, and online testing, have also been discussed. In general, there has been interest expressed in an assessment system that: (1) connects more directly to the day-to-day work in which teachers and students engage; (2) reduces the impulse of some schools and teachers to narrow the curriculum; and (3) measures performance on content standards that cannot easily or directly be evaluated via the current MCAS tests.

While these comments suggest the need to explore options such as performance tasks and other curriculum-embedded activities, concerns have also been expressed that expanding the program to include these types of assessments might impinge upon local prerogatives and exacerbate the resource and time demands already imposed on schools by the state's student assessment program.

The Next Generation of MCAS

The MCAS testing program has been an important component of Education Reform in Massachusetts, and for a decade, has served the Commonwealth well. The upcoming release of the MCAS RFR provides an opportunity to make program improvements in response to stakeholders' interests, to reflect the vision and goals outlined by the Governor's Readiness Project and the Board's 21st Century Skills Task Force, to develop an assessment system that is viewed by teachers as integral to their daily instructional activities, and to ensure that we are measuring the knowledge and skills students need to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

One challenge we face is to pursue new opportunities for the program in an uncertain fiscal environment. We will need to find creative ways to implement the current program, without sacrificing its quality and value, while saving money.

Accordingly, we will construct the MCAS RFR in a way that preserves and improves the foundation of the current program and establishes the opportunity to pursue new capabilities. The RFR will begin with a primary program section that covers all of the core elements required by state and federal law, followed by separate and severable sections that seek responses for other possible new components of the testing program. Separate budgets will be required for each section. Some of the options for which we expect to seek responses are:

• curriculum-embedded projects that would be scored locally;
• online high school science tests that open up new possibilities for assessing inquiry and other laboratory related competencies;
• a formative assessment system aligned with Curriculum Framework standards.

We will carefully consider these and other options as we review responses to the RFR.

I will keep the Board informed of additional developments as we prepare to release the RFR, and receive and evaluate proposals for the next generation of our Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System.