Changes in the length of the Maryland School Assessment should have been divulged before the results were released in July, said state school board members.
“I’m very concerned with how we found out about this after the fact,” said board member Rosa Garcia at Tuesday’s meeting in Baltimore City.
Leslie Wilson, assistant state superintendent for assessment and accountability, said the MSA in 2008 differed from the version administered in 2007 in two ways:
- The three-hour reading test was shorted by 15 to 28 minutes, and the three-hour math component was shortened by 30 to 45 minutes.
- Some irrelevant questions were replaced.
State Superintendent of Schools Nancy Grasmick said the changes were not significant and more technical than substantive.
Wilson assured board members that Maryland’s National Psychometric Council, a panel of independent, nationally recognized assessment experts, approved the 2008 assessment, and found that comparing the 2008 results with prior years was suitable and that the revised test maintained the same level of difficulty.
The latest MSA scores showed improvements in reading and math for several student groups. Black fifth-graders taking the math test, for example, were 69.2 percent proficient in 2008, compared with 65.9 percent in 2007 and 59 percent in 2006.
“The results were very, very positive, but they were also expected,” Wilson said.
“Improvements were not unusual in 2008,” she added, because gains among groups were similar to past years.
In the future, school officials will try to share such information in a more timely manner, department spokesman Bill Reinhard said.
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