Retest: Time to relax or time to learn?

The policy of retesting can be implemented in so many different ways, it’s hard at first glance to decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing for students.

Tyson Floyd, parent of three Polk School District (PSD) students, thinks it gives students a bad attitude about doing things right the first time.

Laurie Atkins, Assistant Superintendent for Supervision and Curriculum Development at PSD, thinks it ensures students are learning, not just passing or failing.

Is retesting about learning or is about the grade? How many times should a sudent be allowed to retake a test? Should some students be allowed to retest more than others? Does the student receive full or partial credit for a retest?

In Georgia, the answers to all those questions depends on your local school board. The state doesn’t have a policy on retesting, leaving each board free to construct its own.

In an article in Education Leadership magazine, titled “How I Broke My Rule and Learned to Give Retests,” history teacher Myron Dueck describes his aversion to retesting. When pressured to add retesting to his instruction, he decided to con- duct his own research in his classroom.

His findings were not what he expected:

“The ability to retest on specific learning outcomes benefits both low- and high-achieving students,” Dueck found.

“When a struggling learner sees a score of 80–100 percent on one section after a retake, I’ve observed considerable improvements in his or her overall disposition and confidence.”

Dueck said he also discovered that “by examining test items and students’ performance on retakes, I can often determine whether a student’s low test scores are a knowledge issue or related to the question format.

“For instance, if a student scores low on multiple-choice responses in all sections but high on other question types, that learner likely needs help in understanding how to answer multiplechoice items.”

Even if a teacher believes in retesting, the concept can be a hard sell to parents of high achieving students, Dueck said.

In the Forsyth County School System, where retesting is allowed for a test score under 80, a parent overheard her daughter complaining that her friend made a 70 on a test and retook it and made a 100, according to an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The daughter made an 83 on her first try on the test but couldn’t retake it because she made over 80. The parent took her complaint to the board and eventually the policy was changed. Now, if a student makes below an 80 on the first test, she can make no higher than 80 on the retest. (The Polk District allows a student to take the higher of the two grades as the final grade, including up to 100.)

Robyn Teems, principal at Rockmart Middle School, believes retesting is good teaching. “The thing is the state gives us a set of standards to teach and if we only give the kids one option to learn those standards, the pile of material they don’t know, beginning with kindergarten, just gets bigger and bigger as they go through school.”

Teems said she has no problem with giving a student full credit if they demonstrate they understand the lesson fully.

“If I had a second grader fail a first test on his multiplication tables, but he learned

them so well over the next week that he made a 100 on a redo, why shouldn’t he get full credit?”

Despite her example, Teems said she doesn’t think the pushback on retesting is coming from elementary or middle school teachers. She said there’s a race that starts in high school, where students are competing for honors and valedictorian status based on grade point averages. “They don’t like it that other children get a chance to do better on things.”

Tyson Floyd has three children in district schools and is married to former Rockmart High School department head and Teacher of the Year, Shea Floyd, who left Rockmart High School last year to take a job in Paulding County. Floyd spoke to the board at their July 14 meeting about his concerns regarding retesting.

He said some students were taking advantage of the policy, while others, like his daugher, studied hard for a test the first time.

Floyd also told the board that in the Polk District retesting is being used to “coerce” teachers into giving students better grades than they deserve in order to make the district “look good” to the state.

Whether the allegations made by Tyson Floyd are true, half true, or a misunderstanding, is unknown for purposes of this article. No teacher has come forward and said on or off the record that they were coerced into giving a particular grade or coerced into giving as many retests as it took to improve the school’s “numbers.”

Superintendent William Hunter said retesting does not affect the numbers used to report student progress to the state each year. He said grades made during the year on teacher- administered tests are not the deciding factor in a district’s performance.

Student scores on standardized tests given at the end of each year in each grade are the accepted measure of performance, he said.

Atkins is a firm believer in retesting: “I do not know of a job or an organization that does not allow you to revise or edit or retake or redo. It’s not about a number -- and please don’t misconstrue that to mean that we don’t think the grade is important -- but the retesting opportunity, from our view as educators, is to ensure that those kids understand the content we are teaching them.”

Teems agreed. She said the only thing she’s been told by the superintendent and the assistant superintendents relative to grading or testing is,

“We want the kids to know the material, the grade is not as important as learning the material.’ That’s all I’ve ever heard.”

Retesting is about remediation and intervention, Atkins said, and the heart of remediation is the Directed Studies program.

Hunter started the Directed Studies program throughout the Polk District shortly after his arrival in March of 2013, Atkins said.

In a conversation with Hunter at Westside School during the Mobile Minds University event in July, he said, “I saw the graduation rates in June 2013 and that’s when I started the Directed Studies program.

“We used to hire people we called academic coaches, so we’d take a teacher out of the classroom and we’d get federal money and we’d let them help, say, third and fourth grade kids in one of the schools,” Hunter said.

“We’d hire a bunch of those people. Every building would get two or three of them. We had them running out of our ears.”

“I’m going to speak real plain to you,” Hunter said, leaning in across the conference table. “When I got here, the first thing I had to do was a reduction in force of nearly $3 million. Some of the cuts were to these part-time academic coaching jobs, but some of them were just teachers who didn’t have a full load of kids. I made sure I transferred people around the system so that we weren’t paying for teachers or folks that we didn’t need. We took that money we were spending on stuff that wasn’t working out, federal program money and I redirected that money -- not added more money -- I redirected that money and I created Mobile Minds Specialists [instructional technology coaches] and I created Directed Studies.”

There is a dedicated Directed Studies classroom with a full-time teacher and a fulltime paraprofessional in each of the 10 PSD schools.

.Rachel Graves is the Directed Studies teacher at Cedartown High School. She says her first year in Directed Studies has been an “amazing teaching opportunity for me.”

Particularly satisfying, she says, is the flexibliity allowed for adjusting to the needs of an individual student.

“A large number of students at CHS have a variety of unique situations.” Graves said.

“Some students have children of their own, jobs after school, lack of transportation, sports practice, and/or extracurricular activities, which make after school tutoring almost impossible. Being able to work with students during the school day allows students the opportunity to bring up academic grades through retesting and recover credits to meet the graduation requirements.

“Directed Studies is a student-centered approach to support students struggling to graduate. It was a great honor to watch my students walk across the field during Cedartown High School’s graduation because of the Directed Studies program.”