Students around New York are continuing to learn remotely this year. 

But how do schools gauge the amount of information students are absorbing from home?

“When we’re in an online platform, we can’t do traditional standardized testing, which means we’re losing a lot of the information that we rely on that tells us where students need resources and where they’re falling behind,” said Dr. Leigh Wedenoja, a senior policy analyst at Rockefeller Institute of Government.

Dr. Wedenoja wrote an analysis studying how schools canceling standardized testing could make it more difficult for schools to accurately asses disparities in learning across districts. 

She also said it makes it harder to determine if students are falling behind.

But testing from home also comes with its own set of challenges. Parents wanting to help their children through a test or unreliable internet could lead to innacurate test results. 

“My best advice to schools would be to take testing in very small bites,” Dr. Wedenoja said. “Instead of looking at measuring how much a student learns in a unit, they should really be focused on skills-based testing to try to see where students are missing skills that can be filled in. I think this is most useful in reading and math where there are certain benchmarks, understanding fractions or being able to read unguided at certain levels. And those are easier for teachers to do rapid formative assessments then it would be to sort of get a whole vision of how students are doing.”

For more on the analysis, click here.