Read other installments in our series on Online Testing.

• Online Testing — Part 1: A New Era for Hawaii Student Assessment
• Online Testing — Part 2: More Chances, Flexibility
• Online Testing — Part 3: Immediate Results
• Online Testing — Part 4: Test Will Be Tailored to Each Student’s Academic Abilities
• Online Testing — Part 5: More Accurate Results
• Online Testing — Part 6: Higher Achievement Standards
• Online Testing — Part 7: Higher Tech, Lower Cost

The advent of the online Hawaii State Assessment this fall will mean students get more chances to take the test over a longer period of time.

And teachers will be able to break the test into shorter sessions.

Until this year, students had only one chance to take the state assessment — at the end of the school year. Each student will be allowed to take the new test up to three times over a seven-month period each year (October to May). They will also be able to leave off the test and pick it up as they have time and their teachers feel they are ready.

The paper booklets used in previous years would have made multiple attempts and a wide-open time window logistically impractical — if not impossible.

More Chances

The new software will remember where each student left off the last time they logged into the testing system and allow them to finish any incomplete tests. But no cheating! It will not allow students to see ahead or go back and look at items they already answered more than 20 minutes previously. And even though they get three attempts at the test, the system blocks them from receiving any question twice. It automatically creates a unique, roughly 45-item test (based on a blueprint) each time a student takes it by drawing from a bank of roughly 10,000 items.

When students complete the assessment, the software will instantly score it and the results will be reported directly to an online dashboard for their teachers. (Before, teachers had to wait months before they learned how their students performed on the state assessment.)

The results will help teachers better prepare their students for each successive attempt.

Less Disruptive

The technological sophistication of the online test means that teachers don’t have to wait until the end of the year for a one-shot exam. They will be able to administer the test in a series of shorter sessions at their convenience as their students are ready.

Before, schools all over the state had to change their daily schedules for two weeks every year in order to test all of their students within the allotted time window. Instruction stopped and all attention was turned to testing during those weeks, said Kent Hinton, administrator of the Hawaii Department of Education student assessments section.

Now the assessment can be administered at almost any point during the school year. It will be given by content area: math, reading and science. For each content area, there is one 90-minute test that can be broken up and given in timed sessions that fit in a regular class period.

For example, if a teacher feels her students are ready to tackle the mathematics portion of the HSA, she could administer half of the math test to them during their regular class period, and the other half during class a week — or a month — later.

“I think schools will spend less time testing and more time with learning, because the online assessment is such that you don’t have to change the bell schedule, you don’t have to extend the classes and you can just use the existing time you have for class periods to test,” said Cara Tanimura, director of the department’s Systems Accountability Office.

The online test will also take less time altogether than the former test did, even for students who take advantage of all three opportunities to take it.

The paper assessment could take place over as many as 10 school days. Assuming each day contains about five class periods, that means the HSA potentially disrupted approximately 50 class periods per year.

Even for students who take all three online opportunities, assuming each content area test is broken up into two 45-minute (regular class period length) segments, it would still only cost them about 18 class periods total throughout the year — or four days.

Replacing Quarterly Assessments

Because the test can be administered multiple times throughout the year, the department plans to use it to replace its quarterly assessments, which used to take yet more time out of the school year.

Each school used to have to select and pay for its own quarterly assessments from 15 or 20 vendors Tanimura said, and work them into the school’s schedule. The department will now save approximately $1.5 million per year at the school level.

“We didn’t go this route to deliberately replace the quarterly assessments, but we were hearing from the field that the quarterly assessments were not valuable for the schools,” Tanimura explained. “So as an added benefit, we thought we could use this as another measure or indicator.”

The only drawback to using the online HSA to replace quarterly assessments is that the quarterlies would test students only on the material they should have covered during that time period, she said; the HSA will test them on all the material for the entire year.

“With this new system, students may be receiving test items on content they have not yet learned.”