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TEACHERS WHO TRULY UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY WANT THEIR STUDENTS TO

accomplish will almost surely be more instructionally successful than

teachers whose understanding of hoped-for student accomplish-

ments are murky. In this chapter, I’ll elaborate on how educational

tests can help teachers get a clearer idea of the direction in which

their instruction ought to be headed.

When I talk about curriculum and instruction, I use both terms in

a fairly traditional fashion. By “curriculum,” I mean the outcomes

that educators hope to achieve with their students. The three most

common kinds of outcomes sought are students’ acquisition of cogni-

tive skills (such as being able to multiply pairs of triple-digit numbers);

their acquisition of bodies of knowledge (such as understanding

chlorophyll’s role in photosynthesis); and their affect (such as partic-

ular attitudes, interests, or values). When I use the word “instruc-

tion,” I am thinking of the activities that educators carry out in order

to help their students attain those intended outcomes. As Figure 2.1

illustrates, curriculum and instruction can be understood as educa-

tional ends and educational means.

Although teachers often make their own decisions about which

educational ends they want their students to achieve, in most

2 How Tests Can Clarify the Curriculum

1 6

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Popham, W. James. Test Better, Teach Better : The Instructional Role of Assessment, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/amridge/detail.action?docID=5704436. Created from amridge on 2022-01-13 03:18:11.

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instances these days, higher authorities (district or state officials) stip-

ulate what those ends ought to be. Still, it’s almost always up to

teachers to devise the instructional activities (the means) they believe

will achieve those particular ends. For example, a high school English

teacher trying to get students to become skilled writers of persuasive

essays (a state-approved curricular outcome) might plan a four-week

unit giving students plenty of guided and independent practice com-

posing such essays. Other instructional tactics might include provid-

ing solid models of well-written persuasive essays for students to

review, having students critique each other’s draft essays, and arrang-

ing for a motivational visit from an editorial writer at the local news-

paper. Together, all these activities constitute the teacher’s instruction

and, thus, represent the teacher’s best judgment about the means that

are necessary to accomplish a particular curricular end.

As indicated earlier, a teacher who is clear about what the curric-

ular ends are will almost always come up with more successful

instructional means than will a teacher who has only a muddle-

2 . 1 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION

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minded notion of what a curricular end really represents. And that’s

precisely where educational assessments can help. Tests can enable

teachers to get a more meaningful fix on what it really is that a cur-

ricular aim (a content standard, goal, objective, or intended outcome)

seeks from students. Some teachers may think it odd that they can

glean valuable information not just from test results, but from an

analysis of test design and from designing tests themselves. But that’s

exactly what properly constructed tests can do, well in advance of

their actual administration.

Three Instructional Payoffs What, then, are the real-world instructional dividends of clarifying

curricular aims via tests? There are three of them, and they are huge.

More accurate task analyses. When you have a better understand-

ing of where your final destination is, you can more sensibly identify

any necessary knowledge or skills that students will either need to

possess already or that you must teach them along the way. The more

accurately you can single out any key enabling subskills or enabling

knowledge that your students must possess, the greater the odds that

you will address those enabling subskills or knowledge in your

instruction.

Clearer explanations. Have you ever tried to explain something to

someone when you yourself were less than 100 percent clear about

what you were yammering about? I have, and I always knew deep

down that my explanations were more than a mite muddy. Test-

induced clarity about what a given content standard really means will

help you to supply your students with more coherent, more accurate

explanations.

More appropriate practice activities. Practice exercises, both guided

practice and independent practice, are terrifically important, espe-

cially if you are seeking high-level curricular outcomes. In my own

teaching experience, whenever my instruction turned out poorly, it

was almost always because I had failed to give my students sufficient

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practice activities, that is, sufficient time-on-task exercises. Both expe-

rience and empirical research indicate that time-on-task exercises,

accompanied by immediate feedback for students, are a key ingredi-

ent in stellar instruction. If practice activities miss the mark because

of a teacher’s misunderstanding about what an educational objective

truly represents, then students won’t learn as well. If you use tests to

exemplify educational objectives, you’ll understand those objectives

better and be able to incorporate on-the-mark practice activities into

your lessons.

To sum up, teachers who clarify their curricular aims by using

tests to illustrate what those aims really signify will be able to devise

more effective instructional means to promote students’ mastery of

test-clarified curricular ends. In concert, these three instructional

advantages—improved task analyses, clearer explanations, and more on-

target practice activities—are genuinely potent.

How Assessments Can Clarify Curricular Aims Recall that educational tests are employed to secure overt (visible) evi-

dence from students so that teachers can make an inference about the

covert (unseen) status of their students. Collecting data to support

wise inferences is the essence of educational measurement.

As a school-world reality, however, many of the curricular aims

that teachers encounter come in the forms of content standards

stated so generally that it’s tough to get an accurate sense of what the

curricular aim really signifies. That’s certainly true for many of today’s

content standards. If you study any set of state-approved or district-

approved content standards, you’ll almost always find a few that will

force you to wonder aloud about the nature of the curricular aim

that’s being sought. I still remember my all-time favorite opaque cur-

ricular aim, a state-approved language arts objective: “Students will

learn to relish literature.” I’m sure the educators who devised this cur-

ricular aim had some sort of idea about what they wanted students to

be able to do at the completion of instruction, but as written, I

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T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R2 0

daresay most teachers would be more than a little unclear about what

this chopped-pickle objective really represents. (Incidentally, I have

yet to encounter an objective calling for students “to mayonnaise

mathematics.” But there’s still time!)

To cope with overly general curricular aims, educators can take a

lesson from the tactics of experimental psychologists who, because

they frequently deal with covert and elusive human attributes (things

like a person’s “motivation,” “anxiety,” or “happiness”) have come

up with a strategy for clarifying covert variables. The psychologist

first describes an overt behavior, such as a person’s tendency to

persevere unproductively when attempting to solve a problem or per-

form a task. Then the psychologist chooses an overt operation to

represent these covert “perseveration tendencies.” This might be the

number of times a person continues to press a lever after a lever-press

fails to yield the silver dollars previously awarded by each and every

lever-press. The psychologist signifies that the number of unrewarded

lever-presses a person makes represents that individual’s persevera-

tion tendencies. The more unrewarded lever-presses the person

makes, the stronger that person’s tendency to perseverate.

What the experimental psychologist does is operationalize the

meaning of a covert variable by setting up an operation to yield a

quantifiable result that, in effect, serves as a proxy for the variable

being studied. Educators do much the same thing when they use a

student’s performance on a 25-item spelling test (an overt operation)

to represent a student’s spelling ability (a covert variable).

Because most curricular aims are stated quite generally, there are

different ways a teacher might operationalize any given aim. To illus-

trate, let’s consider a common language arts goal related to a student’s

reading comprehension. Suppose you were trying to measure your

students’ ability to identify main ideas in paragraphs. You might

operationalize this ill-defined skill by asking your students to read a

series of paragraphs (each with a reasonably discernible main idea)

and then asking them to do one or more of the following things:

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H o w T e s t s C a n C l a r i f y t h e C u r r i c u l u m 2 1

• Write an accurate statement of any paragraph’s main idea.

• Select from four-option, multiple-choice items the best state-

ment of a given paragraph’s main idea.

• Orally, provide a reasonable paraphrase of any paragraph’s main

idea.

Notice that each of these ways of operationalizing a student’s

ability to discern a paragraph’s main idea revolves around the stu-

dent’s chief cognitive task in main-idea detection: ferreting out the

paragraph’s central message, whether implied or explicit. What you

must remember as you consider how this or any other curricular aim

has been operationalized by a test is that the specific testing approach

being used is often only one way of operationalizing the covert

knowledge, skills, or affect staked out in the form of a curricular aim.

Nevertheless, each of these operationalizations is slightly different

and, as a consequence, might lead you toward somewhat different

sorts of instructional plans.

Dissimilar Assessments, Dissimilar Instruction To illustrate how it is that different ways of assessing students’ cur-

ricular mastery will often lead to different instructional approaches,

suppose you are a 4th grade teacher charged with promoting your

students’ mastery of a state-stipulated language arts goal in reading

described only as “increasing students’ ability to comprehend the

main ideas in paragraphs.”

As we just saw, there are numerous ways that this fairly loose cur-

ricular aim might be operationalized. Let’s say you discover that a

newly developed statewide achievement test for 4th graders attempts

to measure this skill exclusively by designating particular paragraphs

in somewhat lengthy “authentic” passages, and then requiring stu-

dents to select from four multiple-choice options the best statement of

a designated paragraph’s main idea. Based on this operationalization,

what kind of instruction would help students achieve this objective?

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First, you’d definitely want your lessons to incorporate plenty of

practice time dealing with the intellectual skills students need to mas-

ter this sort of multiple-choice test item. You would need to help your

students make the kinds of discriminations they would need to make

between “best” and “less than best” options in a multiple-choice test

item. You might have your students read a paragraph and then lead

an exploration into why it is that certain statements of the para-

graph’s main idea are better or weaker than others. You’d also want

to make sure your students understand that there is rarely only one

way to state a given paragraph’s main idea. Knowing this, they will

more readily see that they could display their understanding of a

paragraph’s main idea (as operationalized by the state’s test) by being

able to compare the merits of alternative statements of that para-

graph’s central message.

But let’s say that you don’t think the statewide test demands

enough from your 4th grade students. Let’s say you believe that a 4th

grader should be able to read a paragraph, perhaps one of several in an

extended passage, and then figure out “from scratch” the main idea of

any paragraph that happens to have one. And yes, you’d surely want

to teach your students that not every paragraph has a main idea!

At any rate, although the state has operationalized this language

arts aim in one way (maybe because of the cost-savings to be gained

from a large-scale test that uses multiple-choice items), you decide to

operationalize this main-idea reading skill in a different way, a way

that suits your own instructional preferences. You decide to have

your students read a paragraph, then write a single sentence that sat-

isfactorily reflects the paragraph’s central message. In fact, you decide

to develop your own test of students’ main-idea skills and administer

it at both mid-year and near the close of the school year. Your test

presents students with several multiparagraph passages, asks students

to read each passage in its entirety, and then, for each paragraph that

you designate, to write one well-worded sentence that suitably cap-

tures each designated paragraph’s main idea. If any designated

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H o w T e s t s C a n C l a r i f y t h e C u r r i c u l u m 2 3

paragraph does not have a main idea, your students must say so in

writing.

Think about how this different way of operationalizing the cur-

ricular aim would require different instructional activities. For

instance, you’d need to help your 4th graders analyze paragraphs to

determine if there is a main idea. Then, for paragraphs containing a

main idea, you’d need to provide guidance and practice related to iso-

lating the paragraph’s central message from its supporting details so

that students could learn how to produce pithy paraphrases. If you

had used the state’s multiple-choice test as your guide, these obvi-

ously sensible approaches might not have occurred to you—and

might not have seemed (or been) necessary for your students to

demonstrate “mastery.”

What we learn from this example is that the same curricular aim,

when operationalized differently, often requires dissimilar instruc-

tional approaches. For an additional illustration, take a look at Figure

2.2, which shows a typical 7th grade mathematics benchmark, lists

two different ways to assess the benchmark’s mastery, and outlines the

contrasting instructional activities that might proceed from each of

these two testing tactics. The two assessment approaches shown in this

figure are, of course, fairly simplistic, but I hope they illustrate that

one’s teaching tactics ought to flow directly from one’s testing tactics.

Seeking Students’ Generalizable Mastery You may already have picked up on a potential pitfall associated with

test-operationalized curricular goals: the possibility that teachers

might end up teaching their students to master only one kind of test-

operationalized curricular aim. This kind of tunnel-vision instruc-

tional approach would indeed seriously shortchange students.

Remember, a test represents one way of getting evidence that you

can use to make an inference about a student’s covert status with

respect to a variable like the student’s skill in comprehending the

main ideas in paragraphs. Each assessment approach that’s chosen to

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operationalize a curricular aim carries with it implications for instruc-

tional design. Typically, tests requiring students to answer selected-

response items (items in which students select from two or more

already-present choices) will require meaningfully different instruc-

tional approaches than will tests requiring students to answer con-

structed-response items (items in which students must generate their

2 . 2 ONE BENCHMARK, TWO TESTING TACTICS, AND THEIR INSTRUCTIONAL IMPLICATIONS

7th Grade Mathematics Benchmark: Students will be able to employ appro- priate measures of central tendency (mean, median, and mode) when describing sets of numerical data.

Testing Tactic One

Given a brief written or oral description of a fictitious but realistic setting in which the central tendency of numerical data must be described, the student will write a one-word answer indicating whether a mean, median, or mode is the most appro- priate way to represent the data’s central tendency.

Instructional Implications: Students must first be taught the reasons that each measure of central tendency would be preferred over its two counterparts for describing particular sets of numerical data. Then students should be supplied with ample guided and independent practice in (1) reading and listening to descrip- tions of lifelike situations involving numerical data and (2) supplying the name of the best measure of central tendency for describing such data.

● ● ● ● ●

Testing Tactic Two

Students will be asked (1) to write a brief description for each of the following types of central-tendency measures: mean, median, and mode, then (2) supply one written “real-world” example, of the student’s own choosing, in which each of these measures has been properly used.

Instructional Implications: As this testing tactic calls for students to restate a memorized definition of the mean, median, and mode, students would need to be provided with accurate definitions so that those definitions can be memorized. Then, because students will be asked to come up with an appropriate real-world example for each measure of central tendency, students should practice generating their own examples, which the teacher or other students could check for accuracy.

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H o w T e s t s C a n C l a r i f y t h e C u r r i c u l u m 2 5

answers). Any teacher trying to have students display main-idea mas-

tery in the form of both selected-response (the state’s multiple-choice

test) and constructed-response tests (the teacher’s “generate main

ideas from scratch” test) will need to take two dissimilar instructional

approaches.

As a teacher, what you first need to figure out for any curricular

aim is just what sort of cognitive demand will be imposed on students

by any test that’s being used to measure mastery of that curricular

aim. A cognitive demand describes the intellectual activities in which

a student must engage in order to be successful in dealing with the

tasks contained in the particular kind of assessment. The critical ques-

tion you need to ask yourself is this: “For students to truly master this

curricular aim, what must be going on inside their heads?”

If you ask that question after considering different types of tests

that could be used to measure a given content standard, you’ll often

find that the different types of tests impose different cognitive

demands on students. We saw this to be true for the fourth-grade

teacher who chose to measure students’ main idea skills in a manner

other than that used in a statewide test. Different assessments in that

instance called for different instructional activities.

Clearly, teachers want to teach their students to master important

cognitive skills in such a way that students’ skill-mastery is generaliz-

able. A student who possesses generalizable skill-mastery will be able

to apply that mastery in all sorts of in-school and out-of-school set-

tings. There is a real virtue, then, in employing diverse kinds of

assessments. In other words, try to measure a student’s skill-mastery

in several ways, some requiring the student to generate a correct

answer and some requiring the student to select a correct answer

from an array of presented options. Make sure that some of your con-

structed-response tasks call for written responses and others call for

oral responses. Use a kind of “mix and match” approach to educa-

tional testing so that you can get an accurate fix on your students’

generalizable mastery. The more diverse the assessment techniques

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that you adopt, the stronger the inference they will give you about

the essence of the cognitive demands those varied tests are imposing

on your students. Accordingly, the instruction you design will incor-

porate a variety of different explanations, different kinds of model-

ing, and different sorts of practice exercises.

Take another look at the three ways of measuring main idea com-

prehension identified on page 21. If I were promoting my own stu-

dents’ main-idea mastery, I’d initially consider all three assessment

tactics to help me get a better handle on the true cognitive demand

of this skill. Then I’d incorporate all three assessment-grounded

instructional approaches into my teaching, obliging my students to

show me the various ways that they could pull out the main idea

from any main-idea–containing paragraph they happened to

encounter. This is how generalized skill-mastery is born.

Of course, there are some skills for which it is difficult to come up

with genuinely diverse assessment tactics. For instance, if I wanted

my students to be able to write accurate direction-giving essays in

order to show a friend how to walk from Place X to Place Y, my chief

approach to test-based operationalizing of this skill would revolve

around a written test of students’ direction-giving skill—some form

of a written direction-giving essay. Multiple-choice items, matching

items, or True-False items simply wouldn’t fill the bill in this instance,

either to help me better understand the skill’s essence or as practice

exercises to help my students become more skilled writers of direc-

tion-giving essays.

Most of the time, though, you will find that it is possible to come

up with substantively different ways of measuring a student’s mastery

of individual content standards. Those diverse assessment tactics will

not only help you better understand what each content standard is

really seeking, but will also provide you with instructional cues about

how best to get your students to master each content standard in a

generalizable manner.

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Teaching Toward Test-Represented Targets, Not Toward Tests As you’ve seen, educational tests can be used to clarify a curricular

outcome by exemplifying a way of using students’ overt perform-

ances to make inferences about students’ covert status regarding

sought-for knowledge, skills, or affect. Thus, a test functions as a rep-

resentation of the educational variable to be sought instructionally.

Let me say it again: A test is only a representation, meaning that

teachers must aim their instruction not at the tests, but toward the skill,

knowledge, or affect that those tests represent. This is such an impor-

tant point that I dare not race forward without pounding my measure-

ment tom-tom for just a moment more. Far too many folks in educa-

tion, often those who know the least about testing, ascribe far too much

importance to educational tests. Rather than seeing tests as a means

to a fairly accurate fix on an unseen educational variable, these people

believe that tests actually are the educational variable being promoted.

In short, they reify educational tests as the true target of their instruc-

tional efforts. The idea that tests are instructional targets, wrongheaded

as it is, is unfortunately bolstered by many high-stakes statewide

testing programs. Preoccupation with test scores becomes so profound

that many teachers and administrators mistakenly succumb to the

belief that increased test scores are appropriate educational targets.

They’re not.

Educators must recognize that tests are sometimes fallible tools

and that the only legitimate application of these tools is to help us

determine a student’s status with respect to a significant educational

variable. When this point is clear, most teachers will try to aim their

instruction toward what a test represents rather than toward the test

itself. Diverse types of tests will usually incline teachers to do just

this.

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Recommended Resources

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objec- tives. New York: Longman.

Jacobs, H. H. (Program Consultant). (1991). Curriculum mapping: Charting the course for content [Videotape]. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Kendall, J. S., & Marzano, R. J. (2000). Content knowledge: A compendium of standards and benchmarks for K–12 education (3rd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; and Aurora, CO: McREL.

Ohanian, S. (1999). One size fits few: The folly of educational standards. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Popham, W. J. (Program Consultant). (2000). Test preparation: The wrong way/right way [Videotape]. Los Angeles: IOX Assessment Associates.

INSTRUCTIONALLY FOCUSED TESTING TIPS

• Clarify the nature of any curricular aim by analyzing the assess-

ments intended to measure students’ attainment of that aim.

• Clarify your own understanding of a curricular aim by consider-

ing the various ways that students’ achievement of that aim

might be assessed.

• Promote your students’ mastery of any important curricular aim

by employing diverse assessment approaches to measure that

aim.

• Teach toward the skills or knowledge a test represents, not

toward the test itself.

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