Sense of Belonging (Strayhorn)
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Higher-order thinking skills are important for K-12 students’ long-term success. However, the lack of widely administered assessments designed to capture this construct has made it difficult to measure higher-order skills at scale. This paper examines the measurement properties of an approach to capturing higher-order skills using extant statewide standardized testing data. We use item-level data from Massachusetts’s English Language Arts exams for over two decades (2001 to 2023) and pair this with a novel coding which flags whether an item captures higher-order skills based on the Webb’s Depth of Knowledge framework. Overall, we find that this is a challenging approach for separating out higher-order from lower-order skills because state assessments were designed to measure unidimensional constructs. However, there are some cases where the data do appear to distinguish higher-order from lower-order skills in testing years prior to the introduction of Common Core-aligned assessments. Data from these grade-years could be used to isolate and study higher-order skills. However, we encourage researchers to proceed with caution when relying on this approach and to also pursue alternative avenues to measuring these important skills.
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/asn1-ev31
