State officials are looking for a testing company to develop and administer the new ILEARN exam, which will replace the ISTEP as the state’s primary assessment tool in 2018.
The exam was established by the Indiana General Assembly this spring after years of debate among legislators regarding the ISTEP exam’s failures and its negative impact on school ratings, teacher evaluations and student scores.
Last week, the Indiana Department of Education made its first step to develop ILEARN when it issued a request for proposals to potential test vendors, who will have until late August to submit a proposal to the department.
Few details regarding the test’s structure are known at this time as the DOE is still searching for a new vendor to develop ILEARN.
However, the Indiana General Assembly has included some specifications for the replacement exam in House Bill 1003, the bill that created ILEARN.
For example, the bill says that ILEARN should be adaptive, meaning that students will receive questions tailored to their skill level and knowledge based on previous responses.
The DOE says this design will help educators pinpoint areas where a student is in need of additional instruction, a feature that educators often complained ISTEP lacked.
Still, many educators are both hopeful and apprehensive regarding ILEARN’s final design.
“I think the main thing that I would like to see is No. 1, questions that are truly reflective of the curriculum and of the standards so that teachers know exactly where students are and then can use that data to drive instruction,” Danielle Miller, principal at O.J. Neighbours Elementary School, said.
“It needs to be leading data, not lagging,” Miller said. “We don’t get results until they’re out of school. We’re trying to utilize a test that they took part of in February and the other part in April or May, to prepare for another year.”
Local educators often point to the NWEA exam as an example of what they would like the new statewide assessment to look like.
The exam is already used by many Indiana schools multiple times each year to track student progress and tailor instruction during the current school year.
“I think many people would be excited to see that be adopted by Indiana,” Tim Drake, assistant superintendent of curriculum for the Metropolitan School District of Wabash County, said. “It’s nationally based, so you can compare Indiana students with students around the country and it matches the timeliness and individual student growth that we would like to see.”
The DOE will have until the beginning of the 2018-19 school year to develop ILEARN.