Why we need the Foundation Skills Assessment

 Charles Ungerleider. Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

British Columbia is administering its annual assessment of numeracy and literacy, the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), in October and November of this school year. Its administration will generate useful information about how well the system is preparing students in those key areas. But the administration of the FSA will also generate much misinformation that deserves to be corrected.

 Those who argue that the FSA should not be administered during COVID have it wrong. COVID is an event that has had a significant impact on student learning, the magnitude of which is unknown. Based upon evidence from elsewhere, it is likely that the most vulnerable students have suffered disproportionately. We should find out! The FSA is the only tool that will provide a province-wide picture of COVID’s impact on students. It is hard to fix a problem if you don’t know its scope.

 As is the case with most large-scale student assessments, the Foundation Skills Assessment is a tool for decision-making at the provincial, school board, and school levels. The FSA provides useful information about system performance and program effectiveness and about equitable performance and outcomes. Assessments like the FSA make it possible to monitor the performance of groups of students (racialized, Indigenous, boys and girls) to ensure equity of outcomes.

 Although used for different purposes, both classroom and large-scale assessments are valuable. The information from large scale assessments can help to inform plans that schools make for improving student performance that teachers appraise using classroom assessments.

Classroom assessments are specific to classroom conditions and student characteristics. Classroom assessments, while valuable for individual learning, do not provide robust, reliable information at a system-wide level using common benchmarks. Classroom assessment is different from large-scale testing in many ways: purposes, techniques, frequency, timing, consequences.

Large-scale assessments are designed to produce province-wide information based upon standardization of administration, scoring, and reporting. Assessment at the classroom, school district, or provincial level do not use a common measurement scale. The meaning of a C+ assigned by grade 8 teachers means different things in Surrey, Smithers, and Saanich.

The FSA is a ‘no stakes’ assessment. The results have no bearing on any individual student or teacher. The FSA is not used to make decisions about individual students or teachers. The information about student performance is not used to assign marks (grades), determine whether a student is promoted to the next grade or retained in grade, or influence any other aspect of a student’s school experience. The same is true for teachers. The results do not affect their salary, job security, or anything else.  

Nonetheless, like many experiences – making a new friend, flying in an airplane, taking an amusement park ride - the FSA sometimes creates anxiety. Educators and parents play an important role in alleviating assessment anxiety. Teachers can help prevent anxiety about the FSA by explaining the use of the assessments.

The FSA assesses dimensions of student performance in reading, writing, and numeracy that are regarded by teachers, parents, and the broader society as being fundamental or foundational to student learning. It is therefore no surprise that teachers feel they should “teach to the test.” The no-stakes nature of the FSA should eliminate any perceived need to teach to the test, but there is nothing wrong in teachers teaching to a test that assesses important foundational skills. It is especially important for teachers to give students an orientation to the kinds of questions and tasks they will encounter on the assessment so that confusion or misunderstanding aren't the cause of less than representative performance.

Schools teach more than reading, writing, and numeracy. They teach personal and social development, citizenship and social responsibility, science, the arts, languages, etc.  If what counts is measured, I think we should create assessments for all the areas to which we devote our scarce time and resources.