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District breaks down testing minutes; staff urge schools to request scheduling help for progress monitoring
Summary
Provo district staff presented a breakdown of required assessments and instructional minutes, showing benchmark testing and progress monitoring can consume hours across the year; staff emphasized that progress monitoring frequency varies with student need and encouraged schools to seek planning support rather than assume one‑day testing blocks.
District leaders told the Provo City School Board on May 13 they had compiled district schedules and assessment rosters to estimate how much instructional time is devoted to required benchmarking and progress monitoring, and urged principals and teachers to request implementation support for scheduling and interpreting results.
Director of Continuous Learning Michelle Eldridge and Superintendent Wendy Dow said the district catalogued required assessments (state, federal and district) and used recommended instructional-minute allocations to calculate core instructional time and the portion consumed by benchmark testing and progress monitoring. Eldridge emphasized the limits of such accounting: fixed mandated tests are measurable, she said, but day‑to‑day teacher assessment (checking for understanding during instruction) is difficult to quantify and should not be conflated with mandated testing minutes.
Eldridge walked the board through the methodology and examples: Acadience reading includes a one‑to‑one subcomponent and was estimated at about seven minutes per student for that timed subtest; whole‑class benchmarks and local measures (e.g., NWEA) were assigned estimated administration times and allowances for transitions and materials. The district’s benchmark tallies reached roughly 900 minutes per year for the example third‑grade calculation (about 15 hours) when benchmark assessments were summed across the year and across instruments.
Eldridge said progress monitoring is highly variable: students below benchmark are monitored every two weeks, below‑benchmark students every four weeks, students at benchmark every six weeks and students above benchmark less often. To model a heavy workload, district staff used a hypothetical class with 15 "red" (well‑below benchmark) students, four "yellow," three "green" and three "blue" students; that scenario produced a high-end progress‑monitoring time estimate that the presenters said likely overstates the average teacher’s experience because the district used conservative, high‑end assumptions.
Board members asked how schools could reduce teacher burden. Presenters recommended spreading progress monitoring across the week (for example, two or three students per day) rather than clustering testing into a single day; call‑on‑demand approaches and brief one‑minute checks at transitions were given as scheduling techniques. Eldridge and other staff offered to work directly with school teams to design progress‑monitoring calendars and reduce perceived overload.
The district also noted the federal and state testing obligations that are not discretionary; Superintendent Dow said staff will present the assessment/time analysis to principals at an upcoming May institute and collect feedback on how to improve guidance and supports.
No policy changes were proposed during the study session; staff framed the analysis as diagnostic and a prelude to improved school-level scheduling and supports.
