Most written responses on STAAR exams will be graded by a computer, according to a new scoring process released by the TEA in December.
The TEA will be using an Automated Scoring Engine to grade written responses for STAAR, and about 25% of responses will be graded by a human, as first reported by the Dallas Morning News.
Duncan Klussmann is an education professor at the University of Houston and has policymaking experience as a former superintendent for Spring Branch ISD. He said transparency is important for the new scoring process.
“To me, it’s not unexpected but I think the key is, as a government agency, the agency just needs to be very transparent on how they’re doing it so that parents are comfortable with the information they’re getting,” he said. “And that teachers are comfortable that it’s a quality assessment.”
Klussmann said there are also some concerns about how the new process might affect scores.
“What we don’t wanna do is have a system that moves to completely formulaic writing. Like ‘If I write exactly this way, I get the highest score,'” he said.
Klussmann said he saw formulaic writing roughly 15 years ago with the five-paragraph essay.
“You did this in paragraph one, this in paragraphs two, three, four, and five,” he said. “And that’s called formula writing, which, you know, there’s a lot of writing that needs to occur outside of that specific formula.”
Last year, the STAAR test went fully online and about 54% of Houston fourth graders scored a zero on the written portion of the exam according to records from the TEA. Before the shift to online, about 5% of HISD fourth graders had scored a zero on the written portion in 2021. Overall, scores have also been impacted by the learning loss from the pandemic.
Klussmann said there are two safeguards he would like to see for the new grading process.
“I would really want to see… the ability for teachers and parents to ask for a rescoring based on a student’s score,” he said. “I think also the agency should make sure that on scoring reports when parents receive reports… I think those scoring reports should indicate whether or not the students’ essays and writings were graded by a computer or graded by a person or a combination of the two,” he said.
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