Education EDU530 Week 5 assignment
1
Chapter 1
Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment?
Chief Chapter Outcome
An understanding of why it is that four traditional and three recent reasons for educators to assess students should dispose teachers to learn more about the fundamentals of educational assessment
Learning Objectives
1.1 Identify key legislation, discuss the history of assessment in the United States, and differentiate between testing and assessment.
1.2 Using the four traditional and three modern reasons for why teachers assess that are found in this chapter, identify and explain the rationale for the benefits of teachers as functional assessors.
Teachers teach students. That hardly constitutes a breakthrough insight. Just as welders weld and plumbers plumb—teachers teach. That’s why they’re called teachers.
But what is a bit less obvious is that most teachers teach because they like to teach. Primary teachers like to teach younger children. High school teachers like to teach older children. Most high school teachers also like to teach about a par- ticular subject. (Have you ever noticed how mathematics teachers’ eyes get misty when they introduce their students to the raptures of the Pythagorean theorem?) Yes, most teachers love to teach. It is because they enjoy what they do that they waded through a medley of preservice teacher education courses, conquered the challenges of student teaching, and hopped the myriad hurdles of the certification
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process. Teachers overcame these obstacles in order to earn annual salaries that, particularly during the first few years, are laughably low. Yes, there’s little doubt that teachers groove on teaching.
Although teachers like to teach, they rarely like to test. Yet here you are— beginning a book about testing. How can I, the author, ever entice you, the reader, to become interested in testing when your heart has already been given to teach- ing? The answer is really quite straightforward. Teachers who can test well will be better teachers. Effective testing will enhance a teacher’s instructional effec- tiveness. Really!
If you’re willing to suspend any preconceptions about testing while you’re reading this book, particularly any negative ones, a binding pledge is herewith being made to you: If you tackle this text with even half the enthusiasm you might bring to a teaching assignment, you’ll discover how testing will make you a much better teacher. And, because your affable author has been a teacher for more than 50 years, it’s a promise he’ll keep. Teachers should definitely not break promises to teachers. (Teachers’ promises to administrators, on the other hand, should be regarded as eminently renegotiable.)
But before the book attempts to convince you, ever so subtly, that testing can be a boon to teaching, you need to get a fix on your own current views about educational testing. And, because this is a book about testing, what better way to help you explore those attitudes than to have you take a self-test that was devised just for readers of this book?
So, on the adjacent page (it’s on the right from where you’re currently read- ing!) you’ll find a brief self-test similar to the ones you’ve surely encountered in many widely read magazines. I saw one such self-test in a health magazine recently. It was entitled “How Long Will You Live? A Self-Test.” Frankly, I was afraid to try it. As one grows older, one gets more cautious.
But you have nothing to fear by taking the self-test that’s been whipped up for you. To emphasize its brevity, it is entitled “A Terse Self-Test About Testing.” It is an example of commonly used attitudinal inventories. Later, in Chapter 10, you’ll learn more about attitudinal inventories. But for now, please take a crack at page 7’s teensy self-test. The way to interpret your responses is given as a footnote at the bottom of the page.
Echoes of ESEA Anyone who has completed even an introductory course in U.S. government knows that just as state laws can overturn the regulations enacted by local com- munities, federal laws can overturn state laws. When it comes to the art of over- turning, federal folks clearly have the heftiest muscles. Interestingly, we often see those federal muscles flexed with respect to classroom assessment. The origins of the tests that we see used in today’s classrooms can sometimes be traced directly to a state or a federal statute dealing with educational assessment. In the instance
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of classroom assessment, by far the most potent piece of test-influencing legisla- tion bearing on such testing was the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965.
Enacted more than a half-century ago, ESEA was a key component of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” This precedent-setting law con- stituted what—at that time—was the federal government’s most serious commit- ment to providing all the nation’s K–12 youth with equal access to high-quality education. In contrast to previous federal spending on public education, ESEA’s financial support to the nation’s schools was downright gargantuan.
As set forth in that new law, unprecedented funds were doled out to states in support of instructional materials, professional development, resources to sup- port educational programs, and the promotion of parental-involvement initia- tives. But because of the unprecedented magnitude of ESEA’s federal funding for schools, key congressional leaders (including Robert F. Kennedy, who was then the junior U.S. senator from New York) insisted that the new legislation contain provisions intended to systematically evaluate whether these new federal dollars were being well spent. Formal educational evaluation was, in truth, generated almost overnight by the passage of 1965’s ESEA.
This potent federal statute has been reauthorized every 5–10 years since its enactment, and those reauthorizations have usually contained alterations, some- times significant, to the law’s key provisions. The various subsections of ESEA are designated as “titles.” Title I, for example, established a program to distribute federal funding to districts and schools serving a high proportion of students from low-income families. Title I typically gets the most attention from policymak- ers because it accounts for roughly 80 percent of the total funding that’s autho- rized under ESEA. Programs supported under Title I, at least at the outset, were intended to reduce the skill gaps in reading, writing, and mathematics between children from low-income households and children from the middle class. In general, this is still the case.
From a classroom-assessment perspective (and you will recall that classroom assessment is the focus of this book) what’s significant about ESEA is that its many reauthorizations have sometimes led to changes in federal evaluation-related requirements that have a meaningful influence on the assessment practices rec- ommended to states, districts, and schools. You will find several such changes embodied in the most recent incarnation of ESEA, and those modifications will be addressed as you saunter joyfully through this book’s fun-filled pages.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 10, 2015, and it succeeded the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that was signed by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002. If you have even modest calendrical and mathematical skills, you can see that, unlike the typical ESEA-reauthorization period of about 5 years, the reauthoriza- tion gap between NCLB and ESSA was more than 13 years.
Some observers suggest that the lengthy delay between the two authoriza- tions was chiefly attributable to a markedly increasing polarization of the two
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major congressional parties. As was the case with the original ESEA, however, both NCLB and ESSA were passed by Congress with substantial bipartisan sup- port. Whatever the cause underlying the uncommon delay in ESEA’s most recent reauthorization, some of the alterations in the law are apt to have a direct impact on the kinds of directives about classroom testing issued to teachers by state and district education authorities.
ESSA’s predecessor—NCLB—had attempted to reduce the growing achieve- ment gap that left low-income and ethnic minority students in failing schools, but it had also introduced a deliberately more stringent accountability structure. As President Bush said during the law’s signing ceremony (televised by C-Span), the law’s fundamental premise is that “every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning.” As you can infer, NCLB was laced with a strong “show us” orientation.
ESSA attempted to preserve the spirit of NCLB, yet it set out to remedy draw- backs that many critics believed stemmed from its “one size fits all” shortcomings. As he signed the act into law, President Obama asserted that NCLB was intended to promote high standards, close the achievement gap, and increase accountabil- ity. He regarded these as appropriate goals, but he also believed that, in practice, the law failed to consider the distinctive needs of each community. NCLB, he observed in official press releases, had “led to too much testing during classroom time. It often forced schools and school districts into cookie-cutter reforms that didn’t always produce the kinds of results that we wanted to see.”
In looking back at the two most recent renditions of 1965’s ESEA, then, we see that whereas NCLB and ESSA have fundamentally similar goals, ESSA attempts to provide greater flexibility, so that states and districts could particularize their programs for implementing chief provisions of the current successor to ESEA. The success of a given state in carrying out the provisions of ESSA’s various titles, however, is supposed to be more closely controlled at the state level than at the federal level, as was the case with NCLB.
Before we depart from federal influence over the sorts of assessment provi- sions that have a tangible effect on a teacher’s classroom testing procedures, it is important for you to recognize a few fundamentals about the ways in which legislatively enacted statutes can determine how teachers test their students. You see, once a federal bill (or, for that matter, a state bill) has been signed into law, a set of regulations is typically readied to guide the law’s implementation. Typically, those regulations are drafted by the appropriate governmental agency (in the instance of a federal education-related statute, this would be the U.S. Department of Education) and then are made available in draft form, for a review period, so that those who wish to comment on the emerging regulations can do so. After the suggestions of commentators are taken into consideration, a final set of regula- tions is issued. These final regulations function as a way of operationalizing the law itself, which sometimes contains segments that are a mite ambiguous.
Because the nature of teachers’ classroom assessments is often influenced by the way a state implements a law such as ESSA, the U.S. Department of Education
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calls on a special collection of peer reviewers who scrutinize a given state’s assess- ment and accountability intentions regarding the implementation of ESSA. State officials, therefore, submit their state’s plans for federal peer review and must often make identified changes in those plans before receiving peer-review approval. A federal peer-review panel of, say, a half-dozen assessment specialists, determines whether a state’s accountability approach, including its state and local assessments, are sufficiently in accord with ESSA’s stipulations. Failure to secure peer-review approval can result in withholding of federal funds, so peer-review approbation is typically sought with substantial zeal.
Classroom teachers who are uncertain about some of the ESSA-influenced issues to be addressed in the upcoming pages, therefore, will often find it helpful to seek the advice, first of district assessment specialists, and then of state-level authorities (such as the assessment personnel in a state department of education), about how best to carry out classroom assessment so that it meshes with state or federal regulations. Although the membership of a given state’s peer-review panel is typically quite stable, changes in panelists can sometimes lead to subtle reinterpretations of ESSA. It is useful, therefore, for teachers to check periodically to see whether any significant alterations have been made in a given state’s ESSA expectations.
School Reform Under Scrutiny As one views the nontrivial turmoil in the nation’s schools triggered by the pro- foundly influential school reform movement, it sometimes becomes possible to overlook the role of educational testing as educators struggled valiantly to cope with a flock of conditions never before encountered. If you (or your instructor) are interested in snaring an insightful appraisal of how the COVID pandemic provided a backdrop against which a host of educational changes transpired, you may find the essay by Chester Finn Jr. and Frederick Hess cited in this chapter’s references (“The End of School Reform?”) worth your reading and thinking time. Anyone who is an educator and who has read this Finn and Hess analysis will then be able to supply a definitive example of what is meant by the descriptor “thought-provoking.”
COMMON STANDARDS = UNCOMMON RUCKUS As a consequence of a collaborative effort by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), in 2009 we saw 48 states, 2 territories, and the District of Columbia initiate a project culminat- ing in the creation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The English language arts (ELA) and mathematics learning outcomes embodied in the CCSS were intended, as a group, to represent a more challenging set of curricular expec- tations than were found at that time in many states’ official instructional goals. As set forth in the CCSS, the key math and ELA content standards—that is, the curricular targets recommended at different grade levels—were identified.
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In truth, the actual development of the CCSS was carried out in a less than totally transparent manner. This was because information about the nature of the content standards themselves—and the specific developmental procedures being used to identify those content standards—was not readily available to interested onlookers. Indeed, many complaints regarding the “covert” build- ing of the CCSS were voiced by frustrated would-be observers of this important curriculum-building initiative.
Transparency notwithstanding, however, the resulting sets of math and ELA curricular targets were generally conceded by America’s educators to constitute high-quality collections of more demanding curricular goals than the official sets of intended learning outcomes then endorsed in some of the 50 states. Indeed, the high quality of the 2010-released CCSS surely contributed to their widespread adoption; by 2011, 45 states and the District of Columbia had signified acceptance of the new standards. In recognition that the ELA and mathematics curricular targets contained in the CCSS represented the essential features of what a state’s schools should be promoting in its students, the emergence and pervasive adop- tion of these curricular goals constituted a landmark in the history of American schooling.
Let’s look, ever so briefly, at what these curricular aims are—with a defi- nite commitment to return in the next chapter for a closer look at the CCSS. In Chapter 2, you will see how the two sets of curricular aims identified in the CCSS are organized, as well as learn what some of the developers of those state standards were hoping to accomplish.
First off, however, we should be clear about what the two collections of ELA and math content standards actually are. They represent the curricular outcomes sought for the nation’s students—that is, the knowledge and cognitive skills students are supposed to acquire in school. Because the reauthorized version of ESEA that was then in place (NCLB) had allowed each state to select its own cur- ricular aims, its own tests to assess students’ mastery of those aims, and its own cut-scores (that is, achievement standards) to signify students’ mastery of those curricular aims, making sense out of the NCLB-spawned accountability picture in U.S. public schools was almost impossible. In an effort to rectify this chaotic situation, the NGA and CCSSO set out in late 2009 to provide a more appropriate set of curricular targets for the nation’s schools. The CCSSO is the organization of the state officials, elected or appointed, who head each state’s public schools. The NGA performs a comparable function for the nation’s governors.
On June 2, 2010, the CCSSO and NGA released the CCSS (National Governors Association, 2010). As noted earlier, many states soon accepted these standards— these “expectations for student knowledge and skills that high school gradu- ates need to master to succeed in college and careers” (www.corestandards.org/ assets/ccsso-introduction.pdf). Given the long-standing reluctance of state edu- cation officials to abandon “local control” over important educational decisions such as curricular outcomes for students, the widespread adoption of the CCSS
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a terse Self-test about testing
Directions: For each of the statements below, use the following answer key to indicate how you react to the statement:
= Strongly AgreeSA = AgreeA = UncertainU = DisagreeD = Strongly DisagreeSD
There are no right or wrong answers, so please answer frankly by circling the appropriate response for each statement.
1. The chief reason why teachers should give classroom tests is to determine students’ grades.
SA A U D SD
2. Teachers should typically plan instruction that focuses on the skills or knowledge represented by a test.
SA A U D SD
3. In their classroom tests, teachers should use only items that can be scored objectively.
SA A U D SD
4. There are other legitimate indicators of a teacher’s instructional effectiveness besides students’ test scores.
SA A U D SD
5. A teacher has no business measuring students’ confidence in their ability to do schoolwork.
SA A U D SD
6. Today’s nationally standardized achievement tests should never be used to supply evidence about how well teachers are instructing children.
SA A U D SD
7. Teachers rarely need to determine the reliability of their own classroom tests.
SA A U D SD
8. It is impossible to judge the quality of students’ written compositions with any meaningful accuracy.
SA A U D SD
9. The enormous pressure to boost students’ scores on important tests permits teachers to employ almost any sort of score- improvement preparation activities.
SA A U D SD
10. Significant classroom tests should typically be built before a teacher plans instruction.
SA A U D SD
Self-Test Interpretation Guide: For statements 2, 4, 6, 7, and 10, use the following scoring key: = = = =SA 5, A 4, U 3, D 2, and =SD 1. For statements 1, 3, 5, 8, and 9, use the following scoring key: = = = = =SA 1, A 2, U 3, D 4, and SD 5. The highest
possible total score is 50; the lowest possible total score is 10. The higher your total score, the more sensible is your view of educational testing. After finishing this book, you might wish to retake this terse self-test (without looking at your earlier answers, of course). If you come up with a postbook score that’s substantially lower than your prebook score, then we should both be worried.
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was genuinely astonishing. In essentially a single year, the CCSSO and NGA had crafted sets of national mathematics and ELA curricular aims defensible enough that all but a few states soon hopped aboard the CCSS Express.
The widespread and remarkably rapid adoption of the CCSS by so many states, however, did not take place merely because of the merits of a more care- fully crafted set of challenging curricular targets. The role of nongovernmental organizations in nurturing such significant changes in U.S. education is now bet- ter understood. In the June 7, 2014, issue of the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton reports that a major player in the adoption of the CCSS was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In an article entitled “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Com- mon Core Revolution,” Layton reveals that the Gates Foundation supplied more than $200 million not only for the actual development of the CCSS itself but also for building political support across the nation—often convincing state officials to make systematic and expensive changes in their curricular aspirations. Moreover, the foundation spread funds across the entire political spectrum, distributing dol- lars galore to the two major U.S. teachers’ unions and such business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—organizations that have historically clashed but that soon became outspoken proponents of the Common Core. As Layton reports, within 2 years of the Gates Foundation’s decision to support the Common Core, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully endorsed the CCSS.
But the curricular aims embodied in the CCSS were destined to serve as much more than lofty statements of curricular intent that, like so many previously crafted sets of curricular aims, typically languished in rarely read reports. This is because, soon after the release of the CCSS in mid-2010, the federal government announced its intention to fund one or more consortia of states whose mission it would be to create assessments suitable for measuring students’ mastery of the skills and knowledge embodied in the CCSS. Two such assessment consortia were selected by federal authorities (from competing bidders) and were funded with approximately $175 million each to create assessments that, by the 2014–15 school year, could be used to determine students’ mastery of the CCSS. Although one of those two assessment consortia has fundamentally been reduced almost to nonexistence, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is still supplying assessment services to many of its consortium members. Each of these consortia was initially composed of about 20 to 25 states, all of which agreed to promote stu- dents’ mastery of the curricular goals represented by the CCSS. At present, SBAC has about a dozen states and territories taking part in its assessment endeavors.
As the assessments created by the two consortia became more widely under- stood, straightforward comparisons among states—the comparisons originally foreseen by proponents of the two assessment consortia—grew less likely to take place. Not only were the reporting categories and the cut-scores used by the two consortia dissimilar, but states were allowed unanticipated degrees of local deter- mination in what was taught and what was tested. The original aspiration of the CCSSO and the NGA to install common curricular targets, mastery of which could be measured by essentially identical or statistically equivalent tests, was not to be.
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In 2018, for example, although 35 states still regarded the CCSS as their offi- cial state curricular goals, many states had made minor changes in those curricu- lar goals and, accordingly, described their state’s curricular targets by other labels. Other states announced a major Common Core rewrite or replacement, and a few states never adopted CCSS. As the version of Classroom Assessment that you’re reading was being merrily shipped off to the publisher in 2023, the number of states and the District of Columbia or federal territories using SBAC assessments was approximately a dozen states.
Given that about a dozen states still use consortia-created assessments, what about the many other states? Where do their annual accountability tests come from? In many ways, we see state policymakers returning to the kinds of assessment operations they had in place before the arrival of the CCSS and the consortium assessments that, in league with the CCSS, were thought by some observers as apt to alter forever the nature of state-adopted curricula and annual assessments. During those pre-NCLB and pre-ESSA days, most states devised their own curricu- lar targets in mathematics, ELA, and sometimes science. The chief determiners of those curricular aims were state-selected educators, K–12, and sometimes university content specialists. Then, to assess students’ mastery of the state-selected curricula, most states publicly issued a request for proposals (RFP) so that independent ven- dors such as AIR, ETS, and Pearson Assessment could bid on developing and, if selected, administering a state’s annual accountability tests. This appears to be the current direction of state-level annual testing. Even though we sometimes see small groups of states collaborating in such assessment ventures as a way of economizing (especially for tests covering particular content areas such as science, or for special student groups such as limited-English speakers), many states are essentially going it alone once more in the generation of annual accountability assessments.
The reason why teachers need to maintain at least a nodding familiarity with what’s happening in their own state with respect to implementation of the ESEA reauthorization currently in place (in this instance, ESSA) is that the nature of those federally sired, often state-massaged decisions regarding the nature of state assessments can have a substantial impact on the way teachers should be build- ing their own classroom assessments. For instance, if a state’s annual federally required accountability tests in grades 3–8 feature a substantial emphasis on stu- dents’ responding to at least a considerable number of constructed-response tests (such as short-answer or essay items), then most teachers in that state will under- standably make sure that their own teacher-made classroom assessments also give students practice in responding to such constructed-response items. Teachers who test their students exclusively with multiple-choice or binary-choice items are setting their students up for failure on the annual state tests. Yes, knowledge of federal or state assessment practices can sometimes make a whopping differ- ence in the way teachers build their own classroom assessments. Moreover, the manner in which a state’s officials decide to annually assess students’ attainment of state-approved curricular targets often influences the way teachers in that state plan and implement their own instructional activities.
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The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014), first published in 1966, contains a set of professionally approved expectations for the way edu- cational and psychological tests ought to be built and used. The Standards not only include a series of comments regarding the way that educational and psychological tests should be evaluated, but they also lay out a specific series of detailed “standards”—that is, mandates regarding what is appropriate in the nature and use of educational and psychological tests. This significant document is published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and is approved by that organization, as well as by the American Psychological Asso- ciation (APA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME).
Because the Standards are often invoked during high-visibility courtroom contests involving educational tests, their influence on members of the educa- tional measurement community is considerable. Thus, for example, those who write textbooks about educational testing almost always try to make sure what they are recommending in those textbooks is in accord with the latest rendition of the AERA, APA, NCME Standards. Such authors, indeed, universally defer to the Standards when recommending how to play in educational testing’s sandbox.
Periodically revised, the 1999 version of the Standards held sway for about one and a half decades, because until mid-2014 the 1999 Standards were essentially the only game in town. During that 1999–2014 period, a series of extraordinarily important applications of educational testing took place (for example, the role of students’ test scores in educational accountability programs such as those fostered by NCLB and ESSA). Not surprisingly, then, the 1999 Standards were regarded by many educators as being somewhat out of date. So when, after a lengthy revision and review process, the 2014 edition of the Standards was published, great inter- est was predictably displayed by assessment specialists. To illustrate, if pivotal concepts regarding educational assessment were altered, or even if such concepts were more clearly explicated, these alterations and these clarified explications would, in a very few years, be incorporated into the guidelines governing not only what was being professionally recommended, but also what educators ought to be learning about educational testing.
The 2014 Standards do not introduce any dramatic reconceptualizations of the fundamental notions of educational testing that have guided educational mea- surement specialists since the 1999 version of the Standards. However, the new edition of this influential document both clarifies and tightens the interpretation of several key concepts in educational assessment. We will consider the most salient of those clarified “tightenings” in Chapters 3 and 4 on reliability and valid- ity. The 2014 Standards did, however, more clearly emphasize the importance of assessment fairness than had earlier revisions. Thus, in the most recent Standards the three chief emphases for educational assessment are validity, reliability, and fairness.
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Do classroom teachers need to become knowledgeable regarding all (or even most) of what’s contained in the 2014 Standards? Surely not! We can let the educational measurement specialists of the world fuss with interpreting major messages and subtle nuances in the 2014 edition of the Standards. But it is a reason- able expectation that teachers at least realize that the ground rules of educational assessment did not arrive from outer space or from a mountaintop measurement guru. No, these nuts-and-bolts guidelines about educational testing undergo a rigorous review, rewriting, and approval process every decade or two by com- mittees of three national organizations most concerned with such testing. What teachers need to know, however, is that if they ever find themselves embroiled in any sort of test-related controversy, there exists an authoritative collection of definite dos and don’ts. It is called the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014) and it is available to all.
When classroom teachers dig into a test-related book such as the one you’re currently reading, it is unrealistic to think that they will polish off all its measure- ment content and thereby be transformed themselves into genuine measurement experts. But it is not unrealistic to hope that such teachers will understand the most important decision-influencing content of such test-related books. Abetted by such insights, odds are that classroom teachers will be far more likely to employ tests of their students in a way that benefits those students. As you continue to read more deeply what’s stored up for you in the following pages, you will hope- fully arrive at the following conclusion regarding educational tests: Educational testing’s dominant reason for existence is that it can provide evidence so that teachers can make more defensible decisions. That’s right, truly appropriate educational mea- surement always provides the sort of evidence that engenders better decisions by teachers.
Assessment Versus Testing So far, you have encountered several contrasts between teaching and testing, even though, when you glance at this book’s cover, you find that it’s supposed to be a book about assessment. If you’re alert, you’ve already started to wonder, What’s this author trying to pull off? Am I going to learn about testing or am I going to learn about assessment? Is assessment simply a more fashionable word for testing? In short, what’s this author up to? These are reasonable questions, and you will now be supplied with a set of compelling, confidence-engendering answers.
Almost everyone knows about the kinds of tests typically encountered in school. Most of today’s adults, indeed, were on the receiving end of a hoard of teacher-dispensed tests during their own days in school. There were final exams, midterm exams, end-of-unit tests, pop quizzes and, if one’s teachers were preoc- cupied with gender equity, even a few mom quizzes. All those tests had one thing in common. They represented the teacher’s attempt to get a fix on how much the teacher’s students had learned. More accurately, such tests were employed to
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determine a student’s status with respect to the knowledge or skills the teacher was attempting to promote. This is an altogether praiseworthy endeavor for teachers—to find out how much students know. If teachers are reasonably sure what their students currently know, they can more accurately tailor any future instructional activities to promote what their students truly need to learn.
The sorts of tests referred to in the preceding paragraph, such as the quizzes and examinations most of us took in school, have historically been paper-and-pencil instruments. When most of us were in school, the three most common forms of tests were essay tests, multiple-choice tests, and true–false tests. Until the past decade or so, those three kinds of tests were, by far, the most preva- lent sorts of tests found in classrooms.
In recent years, however, educators have been urged to broaden their concep- tion of tests so students’ status is determined via a wider variety of measuring devices—a variety extending well beyond traditional paper-and-pencil tests. It is not merely for the sake of variety that teachers have been challenged to expand their repertoire of testing techniques. Rather, thoughtful educators have recog- nized that a number of important kinds of student learning are not measured most appropriately by traditional paper-and-pencil tests. If, for example, a teacher wants to determine how well students can function orally in a job interview, it’s clear that a written true–false test simply doesn’t cut it.
Moreover, the widespread use of computers, along with all sorts of digi- tally based communication devices, has led to a dramatic upsurge in the use of computer-based testing. Later in the book, you will learn about not only computer-delivered assessments, but also computer-adaptive assessments. It almost seems that every new advance in computer capabilities is soon followed by a derivative computer-rooted version of educational testing. Although most class- room teachers will not be generating computer-controlled assessments for their own classroom use (because of the sophisticated programming and time demands of such test building), a teacher’s students will occasionally be on the receiving end of large-scale computer-controlled standardized tests—often administered under a teacher’s supervision. Accordingly, teachers should become at least rea- sonably conversant with the nature of these increasingly prevalent assessments. As you will learn later in this book, while there are wondrous things that can be accomplished when a test developer’s inventiveness hooks up with computers’ capabilities, computer-governed assessments can also be misused. It is not merely the presence of a high-powered computer that leads to appropriate assessment. Rather, assessment appropriateness depends on the specific way a computer is applied.
Thus, because many worthwhile learning outcomes are not best measured by paper-and-pencil tests, and because, when most people use the word test they automatically think of traditional paper-and-pencil tests, the term assessment has been increasingly adopted by many educators and measurement specialists. Assessment is a broader descriptor of the kinds of educational measuring teachers do—a descriptor that, while certainly including traditional paper-and-pencil tests,
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covers many more kinds of measurement procedures as well. Here is a working definition of assessment as it is used in an educational context:
Educational assessment is a formal attempt to determine students’ status with respect to educational variables of interest.
Lest you be put off by this foreboding definition, let’s briefly consider its chief elements. Note that the kind of assessment we’re talking about is aimed at determining the status of students regarding “educational variables of interest.” Variables are merely things that vary. (You probably figured this out all on your own!) In education, for example, we find that students vary in how much they know about a subject, how skilled they are in performing certain operations (such as long division), and how positive their attitudes are toward school. Those are the sorts of variables with which a teacher is typically concerned. Accordingly, these are the “variables of interest” that teachers typically measure. If the teacher’s instructional focus is on the Industrial Revolution, then the teacher may wish to assess how much students know about the Industrial Revolution. In that case, the variable of interest would be the degree of students’ knowledge regarding the Industrial Revolution. If the teacher is interested in how confident students are in their own written composition skills, then students’ composition confidence would be a variable of interest. Educational assessment deals with such variables.
Our working definition also indicates that educational assessment constitutes a “formal” attempt to get a fix on students’ status. (If you prefer, you could replace “formal” with “deliberate,” “systematic,” or “planned” because first-rate educa- tional assessment is not a “seat of the pants” undertaking. Rather, it is a careful, purposive activity.) As human beings, we make all sorts of informal determina- tions regarding people’s status. For example, we may conclude that the woman who cut into the supermarket line ahead of us is rude, or that the man who keeps stumbling as he climbs a set of stairs is clumsy. But these are informal status determinations. Teachers, too, make numerous informal judgments about their students. For instance, a teacher might conclude, on the basis of a student’s glum demeanor during the first few moments of class, that the student is definitely grumpy. Such informal appraisals, although they may be quite useful to teachers, should not be regarded as educational assessment.
When I was a high school teacher, for example, I employed informal judg- ment to conclude that an apparently disinterested senior in my U.S. government class was not really enthralled with what I was teaching. I suspected this chiefly because the student usually slept during class. And I became more firmly con- vinced when he began arriving to class carrying a pillow!
The kind of educational assessment you’ll be reading about in this book is formal—that is, it’s a deliberate effort to determine a student’s status regard- ing such variables as the student’s knowledge, skills, or attitudes. The kind of educational assessment you’ll be considering is more than a teacher’s “impres- sions.” Rather, you’ll be learning about systematic ways to get an accurate fix on a student’s status.
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Assessment, therefore, is a broad and relatively nonrestrictive label for the kinds of testing and measuring teachers must do. It is a label to help remind educators that the measurement of students’ status should include far more than paper-and-pencil instruments. Assessment embraces diverse kinds of tests and measurements. In the remaining pages, you’ll find that, although the label assess- ment is used often, the terms test and measurement are sometimes used inter- changeably with it. This does not represent any subtle nuances regarding the topic at hand—rather, it reflects an author simply getting tired of using the A-word. Please keep in mind, the overriding quest for those engaged in educational assess- ment is to collect decision-relevant evidence that will contribute to better decision making about how to educate children.
Why Should Teachers Know About Assessment? Yesteryear’s Answers Let’s indulge in a bit of time travel. Suppose you were magically transported back to the 1950s or 1960s. And, as long as we’re in a let’s-pretend mode, imagine you’re a new teacher taking part in a fall orientation for first-year teachers in a large school district. The thematic topic of the particular session you’re attending is “Why Should Teachers Know About Testing?” The session’s lecturer, Professor Tess Tumm, is supplying the audience with a set of traditional answers to this the- matic question based on how teachers actually can use classroom tests. Because
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you are a docile new teacher (remember, this is imaginary), you are compliantly taking notes to help guide you during the coming school year.
What’s being suggested, as you’ve probably guessed, is that there are a num- ber of fairly traditional answers to the question of why teachers should learn about assessment. Those answers have been around for several decades. There is also a set of more current answers to the question of why teachers should know about assessment. Let’s give tradition its due and, initially, consider four time-honored answers to the question. Although these reasons for knowing about classroom assessment may have been around for a while, they’re still compelling because they are rooted in the realities of what skilled teachers can do with class- room assessment. These four reasons may well have been the major points treated by Professor Tumm during our imaginary orientation session of yesteryear.
Determining Students’ Current Status One important reason why a teacher might assess students is to determine what they presently know and can do—for instance, what a group of students’ current levels of knowledge are or what their current cognitive skills happen to be. If, for example, a teacher has been instructing students about a series of mathematical operations, there are moments during an instructional sequence when it would be useful for the teacher to know which of those operations have been mastered— and which haven’t. Based on students’ test performances, then, a teacher can decide which mathematical operations seem to need more instructional attention and which seem to need only a brief review—if any.
There is one oft-encountered instance in which teachers can benefit consider- ably by using tests to determine students’ current status, and it comes up many times during a school year. When teachers are trying to promote their students’ attainment of knowledge or skills that are relatively new to the students, it is remarkably helpful to get a fix on what it is that students already know and can do.
For instance, if Jaime is already proficient in solving simultaneous equations, it’s a waste of Jaime’s time to make him plow through practice piles of such equations. In my youth, the following expression was sometimes used: “That’s like carrying coal to Newcastle.” It was used to disparage any scheme that reeked of redundancy. (One assumed that coal mining was a big deal in Newcastle.) Well, teachers who relentlessly keep instructing students in knowledge or skills that the students already possess are definitely lugging coal to Newcastle. Assessment, if it is working the way it is supposed to work, allows teachers to identify students’ current capabilities and, as a consequence, can help teachers avoid superfluous and wasteful instruction.
Thus, by measuring students’ status, teachers can discern (1) where to put their instructional energies to ameliorate a student’s shortcomings and (2) what already mastered skills or knowledge can be instructionally avoided. Such assess- ment is particularly useful for a teacher’s planning if the assessment is carried out at the beginning of an instructional sequence. This kind of early diagnosis is often referred to as preassessment because it is assessment that takes place prior to the teacher’s initiation of instruction.
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Monitoring Students’ Progress A second, related answer to the question of why teachers should assess is that such assessments help teachers determine whether their students are making satisfac- tory progress. Sometimes, of course, it’s easy for teachers to tell whether their stu- dents are progressing satisfactorily. I can still recall, with suitable embarrassment, the absolutely scintillating lesson I provided as a high school English teacher on the topic of modifying gerunds with possessives. It was a lesson designed for a full-class period, and I was confident that, at its conclusion, my students would not only understand the topic but also be able to explain to others why one of the following sentences contains an appropriate pronoun and one does not:
Improper Pronoun Gerund
↓ ↓
Sentence 1: I really appreciate you sending the brownies.
Proper Pronoun Gerund
↓ ↓
Sentence 2: I really appreciate your sending the brownies.
At the end of a bravura 40-minute lesson, replete with all sorts of real-life examples and a host of on-target practice activities, I was certain I had effectively taught students that because a gerund is a noun-form of a verb, any modifiers of such gerunds, including pronouns, must be possessive. And yet, at the end of the lesson, when I looked into my students’ baffled faces, I realized that my optimism was unwarranted. After asking several students to explain to me the essence of what I’d been talking about, I quickly discerned that my lesson about gerund modifiers was not an award-winning effort. Most of my students couldn’t distinguish between a gerund and a geranium.
Although teachers can occasionally discern informally (from their students’ facial expressions) that their students aren’t making satisfactory progress, more often than not we find teachers’ believing their students are progressing quite well. (Note in the previous sentence that the modifier of the gerund believing is the possessive form of teachers. Yes, I’m still trying.) It’s only human nature for teachers to believe they’re teaching well and their students are learning well. But unless teachers systematically monitor students’ progress via some type of assess- ment, there’s too much chance that teachers will improperly conclude progress is taking place when, in fact, it isn’t.
A useful function of classroom assessment, therefore, is to determine whether students are moving satisfactorily toward the instructional outcomes the teacher is seeking to promote. If progress for all students is satisfactory, of course, then the teacher need make no instructional adjustments. If progress for most students is satisfactory but a few students are falling behind, then some separate doses of
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remedial assistance would seem to be in order. If progress for most students is inadequate, then the teacher should substantially modify whatever instructional approach is being used. Progress monitoring is a time-honored and altogether sensible use of classroom assessment. Its use provides a teacher with evidence from which appropriate decisions can be made.
A teacher also ought to monitor students’ progress via classroom assessment because, more often than you’d think, the teacher can stop instructing on a certain topic well in advance of what the teacher had anticipated. Suppose, for instance, you’re attempting to get your students to acquire a certain skill, and that you’ve set aside 2 weeks to promote their mastery of this skill. If you monitor students’ progress with an assessment after only a week, however, and discover your stu- dents have already mastered the skill, you should simply scrap your week 2 plans and smilingly move on to the next topic.
Another way of thinking about the monitoring of student progress is that it positions teachers to use the results of classroom tests as part of formative assessment—that is, the use of assessment-elicited evidence intended to improve unsuccessful, yet still modifiable instruction. Summative assessment, in contrast, refers to the use of tests to make a final success/failure decision about a rela- tively unmodifiable set of instructional activities. In a review of research studies focused on the instructional payoffs of formatively oriented classroom assess- ment, two British investigators (Black and Wiliam, 1998) concluded that the use of progress-monitoring classroom assessments can promote striking gains in student learning on both teacher-made and external exams.
Based on the Black and Wiliam conclusions about the major instructional divi- dends of formatively oriented classroom assessment, members of Britain’s Assess- ment Reform Group introduced the idea of classroom assessment for learning—in contrast to assessment of, learning. They describe this approach as follows:
Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting pupils’ learning. It thus differs from assessment designed primarily to serve the purpose of accountability, or of ranking, or of certifying competence. (Black et al., 2002)
Stiggins and Chappuis (2016) have also pushed assessment for learning as the cornerstone of effective classroom measurement. Later, in Chapter 12, you will learn much more about the fundamentals of formative assessment. However, any sort of serious look into the nature of classroom assessment during the past two decades will reveal a marked increase in the advocacy—as well as the empiri- cal support for—formative assessment. It is a sufficiently powerful utilization of classroom assessment to improve instruction that Chapter 12’s focus on monitor- ing students’ progress is well warranted.
One of the understandable concerns associated with the impact of the COVID pandemic, of course, has been the degree to which that enormously potent health calamity has exercised its influence on American schooling. Illustrative of an enor- mous number of investigations is an early June 2022 Pew Research Center study
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focused on how teens and their parents handle the challenges of virtual learning and going back to class in person.
In the Washington Post, Heather Kelly reported that a Pew study based on 1,316 pairs of U.S. teens and their parents provides data indicating a decisive dif- ference in teens’ experiences; “specifically remote learning” has impacted Black and Hispanic teenagers. Colleen McClain, a Pew staffer who focuses on Internet and technology research, tells us—not surprisingly—that differences in teens’ experiences are closely linked to their family’s annual income.
Clearly, as the nature of the nation’s interactions evolve, scrutiny of newly developed tactics for combating the COVID scourge will be devised, then studied intensively. Educators will need to be alert to empirically supported studies such as the Pew research.
Assigning Grades Consider if we were somehow able to carry out an instant nationwide survey of beginning teachers and asked them, “What is the most important function of classroom assessment?” The answer we’d get from many of those novice teachers is eminently predictable. They’d respond: to give grades.
That’s certainly what I thought testing was all about when I first taught in public schools. To be honest (confession, I am told, is good for one’s conscience), the only reason I tested my students was to give them grades. I’ve talked to hundreds of teachers during recent years, and I’ve been dismayed at how many of them continue to regard grade-giving as testing’s dominant function. A third reason, therefore, why teachers assess students is to assemble the evidence nec- essary to give their students grades. Most school systems are structured so the end-of-course or end-of-year grades that a student earns constitute the begin- nings of a record of the student’s personal accomplishments—a record des- tined to follow the student throughout life. Thus, it is imperative that teachers not assign grades capriciously. Whether we like it or not, students’ grades are important.
The best way to assign grades properly is to collect evidence of a student’s accomplishments so the teacher will have access to ample information before deciding whether to dish out an A, B, C, D, or F to a student. Some school systems employ less traditional grading systems—for example, the use of descriptive ver- bal reports that are relayed to parents. Yet, whatever the reporting system used, it is clear that the teacher’s assessment activities can provide the evidence necessary to make sensible student-by-student appraisals. The more frequent and varied the assessment-garnered evidence of student accomplishments, the more judiciously the teacher can assign to students the grades they deserve.
A corollary principle linked to “tests as grade determiners” is that some teachers also employ the prospect of upcoming tests to motivate their students. Because a student’s grade is often dependent on the student’s test performances, teachers frequently employ admonitions such as “Be sure to study this chapter carefully, because you have an important end-of-chapter exam coming up on
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Thursday!” Some teachers surely employ comments about impending tests as a motivational device.
In recent years, several thoughtful educators have proffered sensible guid- ance regarding how teachers ought to award grades to their students (for exam- ple, Guskey, 2020). A consensus of these writers’ thinking—a consensus focused on “standards-based” grading—will be presented in Chapter 16 to wrap up this edition of Classroom Assessment.
Determining One’s Own Instructional Effectiveness A fourth and final reason why teachers have traditionally been told they should test students is that students’ test performances can help teachers infer how effec- tive their teaching has been. Suppose a teacher sets out to have students master a set of worthwhile skills and knowledge regarding Topic X during a 3-week instructional unit. Prior to instruction, a brief test indicated students knew almost nothing about Topic X, but after the unit was concluded, a longer test revealed students had mastered most of the skills and knowledge addressed during the Topic X unit.
Because the comparison of students’ pretest and posttest results indicated the teacher’s students had acquired ample knowledge and skills regarding Topic X, the teacher had a convincing chunk of evidence that the instructional approach being used appears to be working. If the teacher’s instruction seems to be promot- ing the desired outcomes, then it probably shouldn’t be altered much.
On the other hand, let’s say a teacher’s Topic X pretest-to-posttest results for students suggest that students’ progress has been minimal. Comparing results on the end-of-instruction posttest to students’ performance on the preinstruction test reveals that students barely know more than they knew before the instruction commenced. Such trivial student growth should suggest that the teacher must make adjustments in the instructional activities when teaching Topic X again next term or next year.
This does not imply that students’ pretest-to-posttest results are the only way for teachers to tell whether they’re flying or flopping instructionally, but students’ end-of-instruction performances on assessment devices provide particularly com- pelling evidence of whether teachers should retain, alter, or jettison their current instructional procedures.
In review, then, we’ve considered four fairly traditional answers to the ques- tion of why teachers should assess students. Here they are again:
Traditional Reasons Why Teachers Assess Students
• To determine students’ status
• To monitor students’ progress
• To assign grades to students
• To determine instructional effectiveness
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You will notice that each of these four uses of educational assessment is directly related to helping the teacher make a decision. When a teacher assesses to determine students’ status, the teacher uses test results to decide what instructional objectives to pursue. When a teacher assesses students’ progress, the teacher uses test results to decide whether certain parts of the ongoing instructional program need to be altered. When a teacher assesses students to help assign grades, the teacher uses students’ performances to decide which students get which grades. And, finally, when a teacher uses pretest-to-posttest assessment results to indicate how effective an instructional sequence has been, the teacher is trying to decide whether the instructional sequence needs to be overhauled. Teachers should never assess students without a clear understanding of what decision will be informed by the results of the assessment. Indeed, the chief function of educational assess- ment is to improve the quality of educational decision making.
Taken in concert, the four traditional reasons just described should incline teachers to assess up a storm in their classrooms. But these days, even more rea- sons can be given to explain why teachers need to know about assessment.
Why Should Teachers Know About Assessment? Today’s Answers In addition to the four traditional reasons why teachers need to know about assessment, there are three new reasons that should incline teachers to dive joy- fully into the assessment pool. These three reasons, having emerged during the past few decades, provide compelling support for the conclusion that today’s teachers dare not be ignorant regarding educational assessment. Let’s consider three new roles for educational assessment and see why these new functions of educational testing should inspire you to pump up your assessment knowledge and skills.
Influencing Public Perceptions of Educational Effectiveness When I was a high school teacher a long while ago, teachers were occasionally asked to give nationally standardized achievement tests. But to be honest, no one really paid much attention to the test results. My fellow teachers glanced at the test-score reports, but were rarely influenced by them. The public was essentially oblivious to the testing process and altogether disinterested in the results, unless, of course, parents received a report that their child was performing below expec- tations. Testing took place back then, but it was no big deal.
During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a modest journalistic wrinkle changed all that. Newspaper editors began to publish statewide educational test results on a district-by-district and even school-by-school basis. Citizens could see how
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their school or district stacked up to other schools or districts in the state. Districts and schools were ranked from top to bottom.
From a news perspective, the publishing of test results was a genuine coup. The test scores were inexpensive to obtain, and readers were really interested in the test results. Residents of low-ranked districts could complain; residents of high- ranked districts could crow. More important, because there were no other handy indices of educational effectiveness around, test results became the measuring stick by which citizens reached conclusions about how well their schools were doing. There are many reports of realtors trying to peddle homes to prospective buyers on the basis of their being located “in a school district with excellent test scores.”
As matters stand, students’ performances on a state’s accountability tests are certain to influence the way that all teachers are evaluated—even if a particular teacher’s own students never come within miles of an accountability test. Here’s how this will happen.
Suppose you teach ninth-grade social studies, and your ninth-graders aren’t required to take federally required accountability tests. Suppose you’re a second-grade teacher, and your students aren’t required to take any sort of accountability test. Suppose you’re a high school teacher who teaches subjects and grade levels where no federal or state accountability tests are required. In all these “suppose” situations, your students won’t be taking accountability exams. However, the public’s perception of your personal effectiveness will most certainly be influenced by the scores of your school’s students on any accountability tests that are required and reported for such schools. Let’s be honest—do you want to be a teacher in a “failing” school? Do you want your students’ parents to regard you as ineffective because you happen to do your teaching in what’s thought to be a sub-par school?
The reality is that the performance of any school’s students on federally stipu- lated accountability tests will reflect on every teacher in that school. If you teach in a school that’s regarded as successful, then you will be seen as a member of an effective educational team. The opposite will also be true. Unless federal account- ability requirements are substantially softened, no public school teacher will be able to remain isolated from the impact of externally imposed accountability tests.
And, as will be pointed out later in the book, the nature of a school’s success on high-stakes external assessments, such as federally required accountability tests, will (and, indeed, should) have an impact on the sorts of classroom assess- ments you personally choose to employ. Today’s educators live in an era when public perceptions of schooling are more important than many educators might prefer. Yet, like it or not, that’s the reality current teachers must face.
Helping Evaluate Teachers Teaching skill is coming under increasing scrutiny these days. With the push for more rigorous evaluation of a classroom teacher’s performance, we now see many teacher appraisal systems in which students’ test performances constitute one key
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category of evidence being used to evaluate teachers. Sometimes, teachers are directed to assemble pretest and posttest data that can be used to infer how much learning by students was promoted by the teacher. And, of course, teachers whose students are required to take a state’s annual accountability tests understand all too well that their students’ scores on those tests will play a prominent role in teacher evaluation—that is, in the evaluation of their teaching.
Although we will consider the topic of teacher evaluation far more thor- oughly in Chapter 15, it should be noted at this point that a pair of federal ini- tiatives have spurred much greater use of students’ test scores in the appraisal of teachers. In 2009, the federal Race to the Top Program offered some serious financial grants to states that would be willing to install, among other reforms, teacher evaluation systems in which students’ test performances played a promi- nent role. Two years later, in 2011, once again federal officials offered a flexibility program that allowed states to seek a waiver from the harsh penalties linked to the final days of the No Child Left Behind Act if they installed teacher evaluation programs in which students’ test scores were regarded as a significant factor in evaluating the state’s teachers.
Decision time pressure from “higher Ups”
Laura Lund has been teaching second-graders at Horace Mann Elementary School for the past 3 years. During that period, she has become increasingly convinced that “developmentally appropriate instruction” is what she wants in her classroom. Developmentally appropriate instruction takes place when the instructional activities for children are matched not only with the typical developmental level of children in that grade but also with the particular developmental level of each child. Because of her growing commitment to developmental appropriateness, and to its clear implications for individualized instruction, students now no longer receive, in unison, the same kinds of massed practice drills in reading and mathematics provided earlier in her career.
Having discovered what kinds of changes are taking place in second grade, however, the third- grade and fourth-grade teachers in her school have registered great concern over what they regard as less attention to academics, at least less attention
to the traditional sort of academics. Because state accountability tests are given to all third- and fourth- grade students each spring, Laura’s colleagues are afraid their students will not perform well on those tests because they will not be skilled at the end of the second grade.
A year or so earlier, when Laura was teaching her second grade in a fairly traditional manner, it was widely recognized that most of her students went on to the third grade with a solid mastery of reading and mathematics. Now, however, the school’s third- and fourth-grade teachers fear that “Horace Mann’s accountability scores may plummet.”
As Laura sees it, she must decide whether to (1) revert to her former instructional practices or (2) maintain her emphasis on developmentally appropriate instruction. In either case, she realizes that she must try to justify her action to her colleagues.
If you were Laura Lund, what would your decision be?
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Even though the education officials of most states signed up for one or both of those federal incentive programs and promised to implement systems for evaluating teachers (and principals) using programs featuring students’ assessed growth, a good many states now seem to be treading water or scurrying away from the implementation of their once-promised educator evaluation programs. Nonetheless, in most of our states, descriptions of the current state-decreed teacher evaluation system call for use of students’ measured growth as one key evaluative criterion.
As a practical matter, then, because educational assessments will be employed to collect evidence of students’ learning, and because this evidence will be used to evaluate teachers, a teacher would have to be a downright dunce to dodge the acquisition of information about sensible and senseless ways to measure students’ status.
However, as you will learn in later chapters, only certain kinds of educational assessments can properly carry out this sort of test-based task. Many of the tests proposed for this purpose are altogether inappropriate for such an evaluative assignment. Nonetheless, if judgments about teachers’ quality are—because of well-intentioned legislative actions—to be based in part on students’ assessment performances, then it is apparent that teachers need to learn about the kinds of tests that will support, or possibly distort, this evaluative endeavor.
Experienced teachers will be quick to tell you that the caliber of students’ test performances is dramatically influenced by the caliber of the students being tested. It should be apparent that a teacher who is blessed with a flock of bright students will almost always get better test results than a teacher who must work with a less able group of students. And let’s not forget about the quality of students’ previous teachers. Wouldn’t you rather be receiving a new group of students who had been effectively taught by Mrs. X than a group of students who had been ineffectively taught by Mrs. Y? Nonetheless, increasing numbers of statewide and districtwide teacher evaluation systems now call for teachers to assemble tangible evidence of student accomplish- ments based on external exams or teacher-made classroom assessments. It is clear, therefore, that today’s teachers need to know enough about edu- cational assessment to corral compelling evidence regarding their own stu- dents’ growth. In Chapter 15 we will consider today’s teacher evaluation strategies in more detail.
Clarifying Teachers’ Instructional Intentions For many years, educational tests were regarded as instructional afterthoughts. As soon as an instructional unit was over, the teacher got busy cranking out a test. Tests were rarely created before instruction was initiated. Instead, tests were devised after instruction to fulfill some of the traditional functions of educa- tional assessment described earlier in the chapter—for example, the assignment of grades.
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Today, however, many educational measuring instruments have become high-stakes tests. A high-stakes test is an assessment for which important conse- quences ride on the test’s results. One example of an educational high-stakes test is a statewide test of basic skills that must be mastered before a student graduates. (Note that the important consequences are for the test taker.) Another example is the results of a districtwide achievement test that are publicized so local taxpay- ers’ judgments about their schools’ educational effectiveness are influenced by the test results. (Note that in this second case, the important consequences affect the educators who prepared the students, not the test takers themselves.)
A federally required accountability test falls into this second category of high-stakes tests. Because students’ performances on these tests will so power- fully influence the way people regard a school staff’s quality, such accountabil- ity tests will be genuinely high-stakes tests. You should know, however, there is nothing in ESSA that requires diploma denial or obliges students to be held back at grade level if they fail to perform well enough on a test. A state’s decision, how- ever, can transform a federal test into one that has an adverse impact on particular categories of students. Many people continue to be confused by this, because they assume that any federally mandated accountability test automatically requires diploma-denial or promotion-denial testing. It’s just not so.
Insofar as important consequences are directly linked to assessment results, the content of such high-stakes tests tends to be emphasized instructionally by teachers. Because teachers want their students to perform well on high-stakes tests (for the students’ own good and/or for the teacher’s benefit), high-stakes tests tend to serve as the kind of curricular magnet seen in Figure 1.1.
TESTS
T H E C U R R I C U L U M
Figure 1.1 the Curricular Impact of high-Stakes tests
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Why Should teachers Know about assessment? today’s answers 25
On some educational grounds, teachers might prefer that tests did not influ- ence instruction so directly, but the reality is that high-stakes assessment will almost certainly have an impact on classroom instructional practices. Because this curricular influence is sure to be present, it will be in teachers’ and students’ best interests if the nature of the upcoming assessment is well enough understood so that the teacher can organize the most effective, on-target instruction possible. (Later in the book, we will consider the deficits of teaching exclusively in terms of assessment targets.) In a sense, however, the more that teachers understand what the innards of a test are, the more effectively they can use this understanding to clarify what’s to be sought instructionally.
Even the low-stakes classroom tests routinely employed by teachers can help teachers clarify their instructional targets. Tests should obviously not be instruc- tional afterthoughts. Rather, classroom assessment instruments should always be prepared prior to any instructional planning. This sort of early test building is undertaken in order for the teacher to better understand what is being sought of students and, therefore, what to incorporate in instructional activities. Assessment instruments prepared prior to instruction concretely exemplify a teacher’s instruc- tional intentions and, as a consequence, help clarify those intentions. Accordingly, clarified instructional intentions characteristically lead to more effective instruc- tional decisions by the teacher. The better you understand where you’re going, the more efficiently you can get there.
Although the clarity provided by a lucid spell-out of students’ intended out- comes can play a potent role in helping teachers know where they are heading, clarity of learning objective can also encourage educators to boost students’ mas- tery of what’s being sought instructionally. In a May 2022 commentary, Roland Fryer argued that to deal with unique learning losses such as those stemming from the COVID pandemic, motivating parents and teachers with financial incentives might be effectively advocated. Indeed, he observed that “there is some evidence, for example, that incentives for parents and teachers can also boost achievement.” To illustrate, parents could be paid if they attended parenting classes or ensured that their children completed homework assignments on time. Teachers might be paid based on the learning gains of their children because of the clarity of intent associated with homework assignments. To reiterate, we’ve now looked at three reasons why today’s teachers, unlike their counterparts of a few decades ago, need to be well informed about assessment. These reasons supplement, but do not replace, the traditional reasons why teachers assess students. Here again are three new reasons for teachers to become seriously familiar with educational assessment:
Today’s Reasons for Teachers to Know About Assessment.
• Test results determine public perceptions of educational effectiveness.
• Students’ assessment performances are often included as part of the teacher evaluation process.
• As clarifiers of instructional intentions, assessment devices help improve instructional quality.
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26 Chapter 1 Why Do teachers Need to Know about assessment?
These reasons are also linked to decisions. For instance, when communities use test results to reach judgments about a school district’s effectiveness, those judgments can play a major role in determining what level of taxpayer support will be provided in that district. There are also decisions on the line when students’ test scores are used to evaluate teachers. Such decisions as whether the teacher should be granted tenure or receive merit-pay awards are illustrative of the kinds of decisions that can ride, at least in part, on the results of educational assessments. Finally, from the teacher’s perspective, when tests serve as clarifiers of the teacher’s instructional intentions, the teacher can make better decisions about how to put together instructional activities likely to help students attain the instructional out- comes represented by the assessment. With these three current roles of educational assessment, just as was true with the four more traditional roles of educational assessment, test results should contribute to educational decisions.
What Do Classroom Teachers Really Need to Know About Assessment? Whether you are already a teacher or are preparing to become a teacher, you really do need to know about educational assessment. But the field of educational assessment contains reams of information. In fact, some educators devote their entire careers to assessment. Clearly, there’s more to educational assessment than you probably need to know. What, then, should classroom teachers know about assessment?
The title of this book—Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know— suggests an answer. The key word in the title, at least for purposes of this discus- sion, is need. There are oodles of fascinating things about assessment. But to help your students learn, you really don’t need to know a host of assessment esoterica. This book about educational assessment is deliberately focused on those things that you really must know in order to promote your students’ learning most effec- tively. It is flat-out silly to clutter your skull with a galaxy of nice-to-know but nonessential knowledge about educational assessment. Such nice-to-know con- tent often crowds out the need-to-know content. There is, after all, only so much skull-space available.
As a preview, let’s consider briefly what you will have learned by the time you reach the book’s index. (Because no research evidence supports any book’s index as a teaching tool, if you haven’t learned what’s needed by the time you get to this book’s index, it’s likely to be too late.) It may be easier for you to get a handle on what you’ll be reading if you realize you’ll be covering topics dealing chiefly with
1. Constructing your own assessment instruments
2. Using assessment instruments constructed by others
3. Planning instruction based on instructionally illuminating assessments
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What Do Classroom teachers really Need to Know about assessment? 27
Creating Classroom Assessment Instruments Let’s start with the kinds of classroom assessment devices you will personally need to create. The chief thing you will learn in this book is how to construct a wide variety of assessment instruments you can use as part of your day-to-day classroom instruction. You really do need to know how to determine what your students have learned—for example, whether they comprehend what they have read. You also really do need to know how to get a fix on your students’ educa- tionally relevant attitudes—such as how positively disposed your students are toward the subject(s) you’re teaching. Thus, you are going to be learning how to create classroom assessment approaches to measure students’ achievement (that is, the knowledge and/or skills students acquire) as well as students’ affect (that is, the educationally relevant attitudes, interests, and values influenced by school).
As suggested earlier, the classroom assessment procedures you’ll be learning about in the following pages will extend well beyond traditional paper-and-pencil testing instruments. You may even learn about a few assessment approaches with which you are currently unfamiliar.
In a related vein, you will also learn how to judge the quality of the assess- ment devices you create. And, at the same time, you will learn how to judge the quality of assessment devices created by others. Those “others” might be your own colleagues or, perhaps, the folks who devise large-scale assessment instruments such as districtwide or statewide tests. It may seem presumptuous to suggest that you, a classroom teacher (in practice or in preparation), could be judging the efforts of folks who create large-scale standardized educational tests. But you’ll discover from this book that you will, indeed, possess the knowledge and skills necessary to distinguish between tawdry and terrific practices by those who create such large-scale educational tests. In particular, you can use your new knowledge to judge the quality of any accountability tests that may be used in your setting. Those tests are going to be so important that, if you are teaching in a state where accountability tests are educationally unsound, you definitely need to know it. What can you do if you discover that your state’s high-stakes tests are inappropriate? Well, two action options come quickly to mind. For openers, you can learn enough about the shortcomings of the state’s tests so that you are able to explain coherently to your students’ parents why the high-stakes tests that your state has chosen are unsound. Second, and this may require some effort on your part, you can get involved in educator organizations that are willing to help bring about the installation of more suitable educational assessments. You can do neither of these things, of course, especially if you have only a skimpy knowledge of what makes your state’s tests tick—and how they really ought to be ticking or, “going that extra mile,” tocking.
It is also important for you to know enough about educational assessment so that you can assist your colleagues in evaluating an ever-increasing array of commercially developed educational tests. Educators have seen a spate of such tests developed in recent years, many of them incorporating technical advances in the use of computer-controls for testing and scoring of students’ responses.
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28 Chapter 1 Why Do teachers Need to Know about assessment?
Some of these vendor-produced tests may be quite useful to teachers. Some of them, however, are seriously flawed—apparently cranked out merely to bring in a few dollars from desperate educators or desperate school districts. There is no guarantee that a published test should ever have been published. Only an educator who possesses at least a sliver of assessment sophistication will be able to tell whether a commercially created educational test is yummy or gummy.
Fundamentally, educational assessment rests on a foundation of common sense. Once you learn the technical vocabulary of assessment, you’ll be able to identify departures from common-sense assessment practices, whether those departures are seen in your own tests, in the tests of a teacher down the hall, or in the tests created by district, state, or national assessment personnel. In short, after you finish this book, you really won’t need to defer to any “measurement experts.” You’ll know enough to spot serious shortcomings in their efforts.
In Chapters 3–5, for example, you will learn about three criteria you can use to evaluate all educational tests. Those criteria apply with equal force to tests you might personally develop as well as to tests that are commercially developed. Once you get the hang of how to evaluate educational tests, you can apply this evaluative skill to any educational test you encounter.
Interpreting Standardized Test Results Because your students will often be assessed with nationally developed or state-developed standardized tests, you will need to know how to interpret the results of such tests. In general, commercially developed educational tests focus either on (1) students’ achievement, which, as noted earlier, deals with the knowl- edge and skills that students have acquired in school, or on (2) their aptitude, which is a term used to describe a student’s academic potential. You should know, however, that the term aptitude is falling from grace these days. Several decades ago, people comfortably talked about “intelligence.” Prospective teachers learned all about the intelligence quotient (IQ), which was a numerical way of indicating the degree to which a particular individual’s intellectual abilities exceeded or fell short of conventional expectations for such individuals.
To calculate someone’s IQ, you simply divided a student’s mental age (based on how well a student’s test score stacked up against a norm group’s scores) by the student’s chronological age (based on a nearby calendar). The result of this divi- sion was that student’s IQ:
MA CA
IQ=
But “intelligence” has fallen out of favor with numerous educators during the past few decades. The term intelligence conveys the notion that students pos- sess an inborn, intractable potential over which schools have little influence. Yet our so-called intelligence tests, widely used until recently, often measured what students had learned at school or, more important, what students had learned at home. Thus, the term aptitude has been increasingly used rather than intelligence to convey a notion of a student’s academic potential. But even the term aptitude tends
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What Do Classroom teachers really Need to Know about assessment? 29
assessment Literacy: Only for Grown-Ups? Students’ performances on tests can have an enormous impact not only on the students who take educational tests but also on the test taker’s family. Teachers, too, are often affected by their students’ test scores. To illustrate, today’s teachers seem to be frequently buffeted by educational accountability tests whereon students’ test scores can have an impact on teachers’ tenure, assignment, and salaries. Clearly, educators at all levels, whether teachers or administrators, need to learn enough about educational tests to carry out their responsibilities successfully.
What those educators need, then, is a reasonable dose of assessment literacy. And here’s a definition of it:
Assessment literacy consists of an individual’s understandings of the fundamental assessment concepts and procedures deemed likely to influ- ence educational decisions.
Notice that this definition is focused on someone’s understandings of educational measurement’s basic concepts and procedures of educational assessment. What an assessment- literate person needs to understand is not esoteric and incomprehensible. Rather, most of it is just common sense applied to educational measurement. Describing assessment literacy a bit differently, it represents the most fundamental measurement procedures and concepts thought to make a difference in the decisions made about the students who must take educational tests.
Well, if that’s what assessment literacy is, who needs to have it? There’s considerable pressure these days on teachers to become more assessment literate. You are currently reading a book that, unless the book’s author has really let you down, ought to help you personally become more assessment literate.
But what about educational policymakers? And what about parents of school-age children? And, finally, what about students themselves? Don’t all three of these groups need to beef up their understandings about the key assessment-related principles and processes that can influence students’ lives?
Here’s a little challenge for you. As you read this book, occasionally pause to think how you might relay to policymakers (such as school board members), parents (such as your own students’ parents), and students (such as the ones you’re teaching) the most essential things about the assessment-related concepts and procedures you’re encountering. Remember, because test results these days can increasingly enhance or impair the decisions made about students, don’t those students at least have the right to know what’s going on behind the assessment curtain? A reasonable helping of assessment literacy is good for almost everyone!
It should be noted that, recently, some educational leaders have advocated the acquisition of data literacy by educators. Whereas assessment literacy is exclusively focused on understandings about the use of educational tests, the notion of data literacy typically covers an educator’s comprehension of a broader range of educational evidence, typically numerical in nature, collected for schools, districts, or states. To illustrate, students’ attendance and tardiness are both variables of interest to educators— variables that can contribute to key decisions about educational programs—but such data are not captured by educational testing devices. Thus, the label “data literacy,” because it can also include attention to scads of test results, is seen by some as more inclusive than “assessment literacy.” As a practical matter, however, both of those descriptors are worthy of advocacy.
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30 Chapter 1 Why Do teachers Need to Know about assessment?
to create the perception that there is some sort of innate cap on one’s potential. Because of this perception, the commercial test makers who formerly created so- called intelligence tests, and then renamed them aptitude tests, are looking for a less negatively loaded descriptor. Interestingly, the tests themselves, although they’ve often been rechristened, haven’t really changed all that much.
At any rate, you’ll learn how to make sense out of the kinds of reports regard- ing student performance that are released by those who conduct large-scale assessments. You will need this knowledge not only to inform your own decisions about classroom instruction, but also to interpret students’ test performances to parents who may demand answers to questions such as, “What does my son’s standardized test performance at the 40th percentile really mean?” or “If my fifth- grade daughter earned a grade-equivalent score at the eighth-grade level on this year’s standardized achievement test, why shouldn’t she be promoted?” In short, you’ll learn how to interpret students’ performances on both achievement tests and aptitude tests. Moreover, given the relatively recent arrival of computer- administered and computer-adaptive educational tests, you’ll find that parents are apt to be raising questions about such technologically abetted tests. Teachers need to be able to respond to such questions—preferably with the correct answers.
Instructionally Illuminating Assessment Earlier, we suggested that because assessment devices exemplify a teacher’s instructional intentions, those assessment instruments can clarify the teacher’s instructional decision making. You’ll learn more about how the link between test- ing and teaching can prove beneficial to your students because you will be able to provide more on-target, effective instruction.
On the other hand, you’ll also learn how some teachers inappropriately pre- pare their students for tests, particularly for high-stakes tests. You will learn about ways of judging whether a given test preparation practice is (1) in students’ best interests from an educational perspective and (2) in educators’ best interests from an ethical perspective. In short, you’ll learn about the increasingly important rela- tionship between instruction and assessment.
Later, you’ll discover ways to build classroom assessments so that they’ll have a decisively positive impact on how well you teach. Tests, if deliberately created with instruction in mind, can boost your personal success as a teacher. We’ll dig into that topic in Chapter 12.
There’s another important issue that should be brought to your attention— namely, the possibility (after you’ve finished the book) of your helping parents learn more about educational assessment. And why, you might ask, should a teacher be messing around trying to promote parental measurement moxie? It’s a good question. And the answer is this: Parents who are assessment literate will be better able to help you help their children learn more successfully.
You see, most parents know little more about testing than what they can recall, often vaguely, from their own classroom days as students. But the nature of classroom testing has changed dramatically since that time. Not only are new
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What Do Classroom teachers really Need to Know about assessment? 31
But What Does this have to Do with teaching? This chapter contains over half a dozen reasons why teachers need to learn about assessment. Actually, there are seven reasons presented in the chapter, and that’s one more reason than a half-dozen. (Notice how remarkably rudimentary the arithmetic in this book is going to be!)
But let’s single out the two reasons why, from an instructional perspective, all teachers need to know about testing. The first of these reasons is the last of the seven reasons cited in the chapter— namely, the instructional-planning payoffs teachers can get from a clarified understanding of what they’re trying to have their students accomplish. Because a properly constructed classroom test can truly exemplify what a teacher is trying to achieve, the resulting clarity of intention helps teachers make more astute decisions when they plan their instruction.
The second reason why all teachers should become more astute regarding assessment is also instructionally rooted. It’s the second of the four traditional reasons considered in the chapter— namely, so teachers can monitor students’ progress. If teachers use students’ assessed levels of achievement to determine whether the current instructional plan is stellar or sickly, then teachers’ adjustments in lessons can, if warranted, be more accurately made. Without the evidence yielded by classroom assessments, a teacher will often fail to spot instructional inadequacies. As the British investigators Black and Wiliam quite clearly reported (1998), the instructional dividends from monitoring students’ progress can be striking. Their views were based on solid research investigations, not wishful yearnings. And, of course, any assertion delivered in a British accent reeks of credibility.
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32 Chapter 1 Why Do teachers Need to Know about assessment?
parent talk Mr. and Mrs. Abioye are attending a back-to-school night at a middle school where their daughter, Thandiwe, is a fifth-grader. After briefly leafing through Thandiwe’s math portfolio and language arts portfolio, they get around to the real reason they’ve come to school. Mrs. Abioye, looking more than a little belligerent, says, “Thandiwe tells us she gets several teacher-made tests in class every week. All that testing can’t be necessary. It obviously reduces the time you spend teaching her! Why is there so darn much testing in your class?”
If I were you, here’s how I’d respond to Mrs. Abioye:
“I suppose it might seem to you that there’s too much testing going on in my class, and I can understand your concern about testing time taking away from teaching time. But let me explain how the time my students spend doing classroom assessments really leads to much better use of instructional time.
“You see, the way I use classroom assessment is to make sure my instruction is on target and, most
important, to make sure I don’t waste the children’s time. Last month, for instance, we started a new unit in social studies, and I gave students a short pretest to find out what they already knew. To my delight, I discovered that almost all of the students—including Thandiwe—knew well over half of what I had been planning to teach.
“Based on the pretest results, I was able to shorten the social studies unit substantially and spend the extra time giving students more practice on their skills in map interpretation. You probably saw some of the maps Thandiwe was interpreting as part of her homework assignments.
“Mr. and Mrs. Abioye, I want Thandiwe’s time in class to be as well spent as possible. And to make sure of that, I use formal and informal classroom tests to be certain that I’m teaching her and her classmates what they really need to learn.”
Now, how would you respond to Mrs. Abioye?
approaches to assessment being used in classrooms, but students’ test scores are also being employed to judge the success of teachers’ instructional efforts. You’ll learn in Chapter 15 that, depending on the tests being used, this may be a really rancid idea. If you and your students’ parents truly understand the basics of edu- cational assessment, you can work together in many ways that will benefit your students. Assessment-literate parents can be a potent force to counter the serious misuses of educational tests we see so often today. And if you are teaching in a set- ting where officials have opted to use instructionally inappropriate accountability tests, you’ll find that assessment-literate parents can be a potent political force that might, if you’re lucky, help get more appropriate accountability tests installed.
There’s another audience for assessment literacy that you should consider as you wend your way through this book. Please recognize that the lives of today’s students are increasingly influenced by their performances on various kinds of edu- cational tests. Why not, therefore, administer at least a dose of assessment literacy to students themselves? As you will see, most of the assessment concepts treated in this book are not particularly complicated. Indeed, the truly essential assessment understandings needed by students are well within the grasp of those students. Why not provide them with a bit of assessment literacy? They really need it!
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references 33
References American Educational Research Association.
(2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Author.
Black, P. J., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D. (2002). Working inside the black box: Assessment for learning in the classroom. King’s College London School of Education.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment, Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2): 139–148.
Center on Standards and Assessment Implementation. (2018, March). Using Student Assessment Data to Support Decision- Making. CSAI Update. https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED588492.pdf
DeLuca, C., Coombs, A., & LaPointe-McEwan, D. (2019). Assessment mindset: Exploring the
relationship between teacher mindset and approaches to classroom assessment, Studies in Educational Evaluation, 61, 159–169. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2019.03.012
Finn, Jr., C. E., & Hess, F. M. (2022, Summer). The end of school reform? National Affairs. https://www. nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/ the-end-of-school-reform
Fryer, R. (2022, May 30). How to make up the Covid learning loss, The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/ articles/ how-to-make-up-the-covid- learning-loss-pay-homework-zoom-deficit- reading-math-11653923529
Guskey, T. R. (2020). Get set, go! Creating successful grading and reporting systems. Solution Tree.
Chapter Summary In this chapter, the emphasis was on why teach- ers really need to know about assessment. Early in the chapter, the assessment-related features of various reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 were briefly described, because this oft-revised fed- eral law’s impact on most teachers’ instruc- tional and assessment decisions is becoming profound. Educational assessment was defined as a formal attempt to determine students’ status with respect to educational variables of interest. Much of the chapter was devoted to consider- ing why teachers must become knowledgeable regarding educational assessment. Based on teachers’ classroom activities, four traditional reasons were given for why teachers assess: (1) to determine students’ status, (2) to moni- tor students’ progress, (3) to assign grades, and (4) to determine a teacher’s own instructional effectiveness. Based on recent uses of educa- tional assessment results, three more reasons
why teachers need to know about assessment were identified. Those more recent functions of educational tests are (1) to influence public perceptions of educational effectiveness, (2) to help evaluate teachers, and (3) to clarify teach- ers’ instructional intentions. Regardless of the specific application of test results, however, it was emphasized that teachers should use the results of assessments to make better decisions. That’s really the only excuse for taking up stu- dents’ time with assessment.
The chapter identified three major outcomes to be attained by those reading the book—namely, they should become more knowledgeable about (1) how to construct and evaluate their own classroom tests, (2) how to interpret the results of standardized tests, and (3) how to teach stu- dents to master what’s assessed in classroom and high-stakes tests. It was also suggested that an assessment-literate teacher should attempt to pro- mote parents’ and students’ assessment literacy.
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Hughes, C. (2022). Reviewing the philosophy of assessment. Curriculum on the move, thematic notes, 10. UNESCO International Bureau of Education. UNESDOC Digital Library. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000382586
Kelly, H. (2022, June 2). Pandemic disrupted learning for U.S. teens, but not evenly, poll shows, Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost. com/technology/2022/06/02/ pandemic-remote-teens-learning/
Klinger, D., McDivitt, P., Howard, B., Rogers, T., Munoz, M., & Wylie, C. (2015). Classroom Assessment Standards for PreK-12 Teachers. Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation.
Layton, L. (June 7, 2014). How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution, Washington Post.
Michigan Assessment Consortium. (2020, Winter). Assessment Literacy Standards: A national imperative (Version 6.0). Michigan AssessmentConsortium.org. https:// www.michiganassessmentconsortium. org/wp-content/uploads/MAC_ AssessLitStds_2017_9.19.17.pdf
National Association of Secondary School Principals. (2017, August 7). How to Implement Assessment Literacy. NASSP.
Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://www.nassp.org/publication/ principal-leadership/volume-17-2016- 2017/ principal-leadership-may-2017/ how-to-implement-assessment-literacy/
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics. Author.
Salman, J. (2022, May 5). Standardized tests in their current format are “incredibly antiquated.” The Hechinger Report. https:// hechingerreport.org/standardized-tests- in-their-current-format-are-incredibly- antiquated/
Schimmer, T. (Host) (2021, February 26). Standardized Testing with Tom Guskey (BONUS [Video]). Tom Schimmer Podcast. YouTube. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4LwU6Dnnxuw
Shepard, L. A., Diaz-Bilello, E., Penuel, W. R., & Marion, S. F. (2020). Classroom assessment principles to support teaching and learning. Center for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation, University of Colorado Boulder.
Stiggins, R. J., & Chappuis, J. (2016). An introduction to student-involved assessment FOR learning (6th ed.). Pearson.
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a testing takeaway 35
A Testing Takeaway
Assessment Literacy: What Is It, Who Needs It?* W. James Popham, University of California, Los Angeles
It is becoming increasingly difficult these days to take part in any conversation about public education without someone’s referring to assessment literacy—usually as a plea in support of it. But what is “assessment literacy”? And who ought to be assessment literate?
“Literacy,” through the years, has referred to the ability to read and write. More recently, the term has come also to describe knowledge or competence in a specified area—such as one’s “wine literacy.” It is in this sense that most educators now conceive of assessment literacy, namely, a person’s knowledge or competence regarding educational testing. What it is that different people need to know about educational testing, of course, varies from situation to situation. To illustrate, here’s a definition of assessment literacy intended for teachers and other educators: Assessment literacy consists of an individual’s understanding of the fundamental assessment concepts and procedure deemed likely to influence educational decisions.
As you can see, this educator-focused conception of assessment literacy addresses the basics of educational testing and, specifically, those fundamental concepts and procedures that are apt to have an impact on educational decisions. Thus, a teacher or administrator who wants to be assessment literate need not know as much about testing as an expert who specializes in measurement. Instead, educators merely need master a handful of assessment understandings—the understandings likely to impact educational decisions.
Other non-educator groups (for instance, school board members or parents of school-age children) typically need less knowledge about educational testing than those who are making daily decisions about students, because some of those decisions depend on students’ test scores.
But why does anyone need to be assessment literate? The answer to this key question is that without the necessary knowledge regarding educational testing, mistakes—sometimes serious ones—are made regarding how to educate children. Examples of such mistakes, typically made by those who are not assessment literate, are listed as follows:
• Errors of Commission: For example, a school board decides that an ineffective school serving students from affluent families is successful based on the wrong accountability test.
• Errors of Omission: For example, teachers in a middle school fail to use the formative-assessment process in their classrooms, despite its research-ratified record of success.
Because assessment-literate educators make fewer test-based errors of commission or omission than teachers who are less well informed, please do what you can to promote the wider acquisition of assessment literacy among all education stakeholders. Indeed, increasing assessment literacy may be the most cost-effective way to improve our schools.*
*From Chapter 1 of Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know, 10th ed., by W. James popham. Copyright 2022 by pearson, which hereby grants permission for the reproduction and distribution of this Testing Takeaway, with proper attribution, for the intent of increasing assessment literacy. a digitally shareable version is available from https://www.pearson.com/store/en-us/pearsonplus/login.
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