What Does Literacy Testing Really Mean?
If you didn’t go to high school in Ontario, your standardized tests were probably different, but every one I’ve talked to has had to undergo some kind of standardized achievement testing during their high school years. In Ontario, testing is administered in grades 3 and 6, and math is tested again in grade 9, but the most important one, in that you have to pass it to graduate high school, is the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT).
The most basic definition of literacy, at least, the one I think of, is the ability to read and write. Of course, there is more to being literate than being able to puzzle out the words on a page and being able to write down your ideas to remember them later and share them with others, but all of the other components of literacy, like organizing your ideas to convey them effectively and understanding what important ideas the writer is trying to convey in the text, rely on one’s ability to read and write.
With this idea in mind, it came as a surprise to me in eleventh grade, after I had taken and passed the OSSLT, that I was asked to act as a scribe for some of the tenth grade students writing that year. In this case, it meant reading the questions for them and writing down their answers word for word, assuming that they intended to capitalize the start of sentences and add periods to the end, and including any other punctuation they specified. For the reading portion of the exam, a recording of the selections, produced by the testing organization, was available to them along with the printed copy that everyone else got.
These accommodations, apparently, are not unusual in the world of standardized testing. Indeed, research on the EQAO website showed me that there were all kinds of accommodations available to students with disabilities. In any standardized testing scenario, of course there are accommodations that may need to be made. A student who broke his writing arm will have trouble writing his answers on a pencil and paper test. If he does not have someone else to write, it will take him much longer to complete, and the result is unlikely to reflect what the test is trying to measure. However, there comes a point when the amount of accommodation required prevents the examinee from being meaningfully compared to the standard.
The OSSLT also allows students to have an ASL interpreter. The interpreter is to translate everything on the test into ASL, and then to translate the student’s ASL answers into writing. It seems to me that if the student neither has to read the test, nor write his answers, the test can not be said to test literacy. True, all of these (and other) accommodations are to be used in accordance with the student’s individual education plan, and to be the type of accommodation the student typically receives on a test, but there is a point at which that test is clearly not designed for these students. This flood of accommodations is available because passing the OSSLT is a requirement for graduation from an Ontario high school. The only exemptions available are for students who are not expected to receive a diploma. However, if some of these accommodations are what’s needed for a student to take the test, perhaps there should be an alternate test, a standard course to be taken, or a straightforward exemption.
Frankly, I think it’s laughable to call something a literacy test when there are students who take it who need neither to read nor write. Standardized tests like this are meant to provide the government with information about education in different schools and different boards, to see which are successful and which are falling below the provincial standard. This test claims to serve the secondary purpose of testing the literacy of students, ensuring that they have the skills to succeed in the real world. Although relatively successful in the first aim, the OSSLT fails completely at the second. Even students with special education needs are unlikely to go through life with an ASL interpreter at their elbow to translate every sign they see.
In the end, I guess the question comes down to the purpose of the test. Is the test designed to measure literacy? Does a passing grade mean that this student is able to read a newspaper, or write a letter to their boss? If I knew nothing about this test, I would expect the answer to be yes, but knowing what I do, my answer has to be maybe.
