PLAGIARISM FREE "A" WORK 18 HOURS or LESS

NeNe1994

EpilogueCorainHerClassroomAnIllustrationofInstructionallyFocus.pdf

Home >Applied Sciences homework help >PLAGIARISM FREE "A" WORK 18 HOURS or LESS

I WANT TO WRAP UP THIS BOOK BY ILLUSTRATING SOME OF THE WAYS THAT A

classroom teacher might employ my strategies for using tests to

inform, improve, and evaluate classroom instruction. This excursion

into make-believe focuses on Cora Clark, an imaginary but allitera-

tively named educator who teaches four classes of 9th grade English

in an urban middle school.

State-Sanctioned Content Standards In the state where Cora teaches, there are state board of education–

endorsed content standards for all major subjects in grades K–12.

Moreover, there are statewide exams that are administered each

spring to all students in grades 3–10. The exams are supposed to

measure students’ mastery of the board-endorsed content standards.

Cora has consulted the list of approved content standards, and

she has identified five broad content standards that appear to be par-

ticularly applicable to her middle school English classes. Moreover,

beneath each of those content standards, there are from two to six

“grade-level benchmarks” that identify the particular grade-level

skills and knowledge that students should master. Most of these

Cora in Her Classroom: An Illustration of Instructionally Focused Testing

1 6 0

Epilogue

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 160

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 2022-01-22 03:22:14.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

E p i l o g u e 1 6 1

grade-level benchmarks are accompanied by one or two sample test

items illustrating how the state intends to assess students’ mastery of

those benchmarks.

Although the state’s verbal descriptions of these benchmarks are

far less clear than Cora would prefer, the sample items do help her get

a better idea of what the benchmarks really mean. In fact, Cora rou-

tinely looks first at a benchmark’s sample items to try to figure out

what each item assesses. Only afterward does she consult the lan-

guage employed to describe a grade-level benchmark. As Cora tells

other members of her school’s faculty, “The real proof of our state’s

muddled benchmark-puddings always comes down to how each

benchmark is actually going to be measured.”

One of Cora’s five “most important” content standards is “Appro-

priate Oral Communication.” That standard lists two benchmarks for

9th graders, and the first is “students will be able to deliver effective

oral reports to their classmates.” Cora knows that in her district’s high

schools, most teachers expect students to be able to make oral pre-

sentations to their classmates. In truth, Cora believes mastery of oral

presentations is necessary for her students’ success in life—not just

their success in high school. She regards this benchmark, and the oral

communication content it represents, as altogether sensible curricu-

lar aims.

A State-Unassessed Skill As Cora reads through the state-issued descriptive information about

content standards and benchmarks, she notices that neither of the

grade-level benchmarks underlying the “Appropriate Oral Commun-

ication” content standard will be measured on the state’s annual

spring tests. Cora assumes that the state’s reluctance to assess stu-

dents’ oral communication skills is based, at least in part, on the prac-

tical difficulties of assessing that sort of oral skill on a large-scale

basis. Nevertheless, she regards these skills as sufficiently important

to promote actively in all four of her 9th grade classes.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 161

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R1 6 2

Because she has no state-provided sample items to illustrate this

state-unassessed content standard, Cora needs to decide for herself

how she will determine student mastery. For the first benchmark,

Cora concludes that she will be satisfied that students have achieved

this curricular aim if they can confidently deliver brief oral reports to

the rest of the class. Thus, she operationalizes this particular bench-

mark by tying its attainment to her students’ effective oral presenta-

tions to their classmates.

An Assessment-Triggered Task Analysis Cora recognizes that for instructional purposes, she must understand

more clearly what is really involved in attaining this benchmark. So

she asks herself, “What is it that my students must know and be able

to do in order to deliver effective oral reports to their classmates?”

She comes up with a brainstorm-generated task analysis that iso-

lates a list of specific skills and subskills characterizing the cognitive

demands placed on students when they make oral presentations.

Cora concludes that students ought to

• Demonstrate familiarity with the topic.

• Organize a presentation into main points and subpoints.

• Consider audience interests and concerns.

• Incorporate vivid detail.

• Speak to audience members, not at them.

• Speak distinctly enough to be understood and maintain a steady

speaking voice throughout the presentation.

• Understand that people process the information they hear dif-

ferently than they process the information they see, and use tech-

niques such as repetition and visual aids to address these differences.

• Be familiar with various techniques for calming public speaking

nerves, such as visualization and breathing exercises.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 162

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

E p i l o g u e 1 6 3

Looking back at this list, Cora is rather pleased with its breadth.

She realizes, of course, that she will be obliged to teach these skills

and knowledge to her students if they are going to be able to

master this important benchmark. She concludes that if students can

make suitable extemporaneous speeches on fairly familiar topics

with an overnight preparation period, the chances are very good

that they’ll be able to deliver effective oral reports about topics that

they have become very familiar with through research. Accordingly,

she decides to measure students’ mastery of this key benchmark via

their delivery of five-minute extemporaneous speeches to their

classmates.

Cora also has an idea about how she’ll track her students’ prog-

ress toward the oral communication standard. Because her husband

is a professed “video junkie,” she has access to a high-quality video

camera, fairly decent editing equipment, and a spouse who can oper-

ate both. She decides to pretest and post-test her students (in all four

classes) at the beginning and end of the school year. She generates a

set of a dozen speech topics that are likely to appeal to her students,

such as “TV for Teens: Why We Watch What We Watch” and “Getting

Along with Other Students in Middle School.”

Although Cora could simply pretest, then post-test, her students,

she decides to evaluate this aspect of her instruction (namely, the

instruction focused on oral communication) more rigorously. Her

husband’s willingness to help her with the burdensome videotaping

aspects of this project is a major factor in her decision to take it on.

During the last few years, Cora has learned to carefully consider the

amount of time and effort any particular testing approach will require

before she uses it. She wants to make sure that she doesn’t spend all

her time—or all her students’ time—in testing, preparing for tests, or

scoring tests.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 163

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R1 6 4

A Skill-Focused Rubric At the same time that Cora creates the speech topics, she also devises

a skill-focused rubric that she will use to evaluate her students’ oral

presentations. She isolates a small number of evaluative criteria to

incorporate in the rubric (settling on three) and gives each of those

criteria a short descriptive name. Her plan is to make these three cri-

teria the basis for the instructional activities that will promote stu-

dents’ mastery of oral presentations.

Once she has a near-final version of the rubric, Cora asks two

other English teachers in her school to critique her draft. They have

few substantive criticisms, but do urge her to explain more com-

pletely what each of the rubric’s evaluative criteria mean.

The rubric Cora has devised for this oral communication skill is

based on the following three evaluative criteria: (1) content, that is,

the substance of the presentation; (2) organization, that is, the struc-

ture of the presentation; and (3) presentation, that is, delivery proce-

dures such as good eye contact, appropriate voice control, and the

avoidance of distracting mannerisms. Taking the advice of her col-

leagues, Cora creates—and supplies to her students—a brief written

explanation of each criterion’s meaning.

As the year progresses, these three criteria dominate all of Cora’s

instruction related to oral presentations. It’s Cora’s hope that her stu-

dents will become so familiar with the three evaluative criteria that

they will truly internalize those criteria.

Gathering Pre-Instruction Data To begin to collect evidence about her students’ oral communication

skills, during the first week of school, Cora randomly chooses six of

her contemporary-issue speech topics for a pretest, a different set for

each of her four classes. Then she randomly chooses six students in

each class, assigns each student a speech topic, and gives those stu-

dents an overnight period in which to prepare.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 164

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

E p i l o g u e 1 6 5

The following day, all students present their speeches to the class.

After a short-course in camera technique provided by Cora’s husband,

one student in each class videotapes the speeches against a neutral

chalkboard background that will provide no clues to indicate when

the speeches were given.

Based on in-class observation of her students’ oral “pretest” pre-

sentations (and informed by her three-criterion rubric), Cora con-

cludes that this skill is one in which very few of her students possess

substantial mastery. Although it’s possible that her students received

instruction in this skill in earlier grades, the “random sample” pre-

sentations in each of her four classes are remarkably weak. Cora real-

izes that she’ll need to start with the basics, focusing on the skills and

enabling subskills that her students will need to meet the evaluative

criteria on her rubric and, ultimately, to develop into powerful, fluent

public speakers. She opens her planning book, retrieves her list of

skills and subskills, and gets to work.

Two Other Curricular Aims In addition to the oral communication content standard, Cora also

identifies several of her own curricular aims she wants to work on

during the year—aims not necessarily embodied in any of the state-

sanctioned content standards. One of those aims is for students to

employ Standard American English (both orally and in writing) with

few grammatical errors. As the school year progresses, Cora works on

this objective whenever students supply any original writing and

whenever they deliver oral reports or practice their extemporaneous

speechmaking. During the school year, she tries to use her classroom

tests as teaching tools related to this usage objective.

For example, one day Cora notices that several students in her

third-period class and her sixth-period class are making the same kind

of grammatical mistakes in their oral reports. They are violating

subject-verb agreement, using plural verbs with singular sentences

and vice versa. That evening, Cora whips up a short quiz on the topic.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 165

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R1 6 6

When she sees the results of this quiz, Cora easily infers that most of

her students need a serious dose of direct instruction about how sub-

jects and verbs ought to agree with one another. In her weekly plan-

ning session, she incorporates that instruction into several upcoming

lesson plans.

Cora also has a personal affective objective for the year, namely,

that her students will gain confidence in their own oral communica-

tion skills. To promote that aim, she makes sure to praise her stu-

dents’ progress frequently and gives them numerous opportunities to

discover how much their oral communication skills are improving.

Next year, she intends to formally measure her students’ growth in

oral communication confidence, and she’s already drafted a version

of the self-report affective inventory she will administer to her stu-

dents on an anonymous pretest/post-test basis.

Monitoring Progress and Modifying Approaches Interestingly, at least to Cora, her students take a long time to master

the oral communication skill. At the start of the school year, Cora had

thought that if her students mastered the skill by the middle of the

school year, she would devote little or no further instruction to it.

Near mid-year, she has students in all her classes deliver a five-minute

extemporaneous speech on a topic of their own choosing. When

evaluated against the three-criterion rubric, these speeches indicate

that more instruction is most definitely needed.

Because of her students’ weak mid-year performances, Cora also

decides to alter her instructional approach to some extent. She begins

to devote much more attention to the use of peer critiquing, routinely

charging a panel of three students with evaluating a classmate’s oral

presentation via the three-criterion rubric. These student panels

describe their group-derived critiques to the presenter and, simultane-

ously, to the rest of the class. This peer-critiquing modification appears

to make students more attentive to the rubric’s three evaluative

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 166

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

E p i l o g u e 1 6 7

criteria. Cora is pleased with that particular consequence of her modi-

fied instructional tactics.

Post-Testing and Assembling Credible Evidence of Instructional Effectiveness At the end of the school year, Cora assigns the remaining six contem-

porary issues speech topics to six different randomly selected

students in each of her four classes. Once again, she gives the students

an overnight preparation period, and once again, other students video-

tape their classmates’ speeches against the same neutral background.

From all her classes combined, Cora winds up with 24 videotaped

“post-tests” to contrast with the 24 videotaped “pretests” from the

beginning of the school year. She calls on her husband to edit the

four class sets of videotaped speeches (six pretests and six post-tests

for each class) into a single videotape per class, with the pretest

speeches and post-test speeches mixed together so that the edited

sequencing will give viewers no idea which presentations were

pretests and which were post-tests. Cora then gets a measure of her

own instructional effectiveness regarding the “Appropriate Oral

Communication” standard by asking four parents of students from

her last year’s classes to serve as judges of each of the four videotaped

sets of speeches.

She provides the parent volunteers with the three-criterion rubric

she used throughout the school year—the same criteria she relied on

instructionally in each of her four classes. After the parents have made

their judgments about the mixed-sequence video presentations, Cora

identifies which speeches were pretests and which were post-tests. As

it turns out, the post-test speeches received much higher blind-scored

marks from the parent-judges than did the pretest speeches. This was

true in all four classes, where parent-judges’ scores indicated that at

least five of the six blind-scored best student presentations were

always post-test presentations. In one class, all six of the best parent-

judged presentations had been delivered at post-test time.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 167

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R1 6 8

Based on this evidence, Cora concludes that the instruction she

devoted to students’ mastery of this significant grade-level bench-

mark was effective. She is, of course, delighted with that result.

Although the results of the parents’ year-end, blind-scored judg-

ments provide Cora with definitive, nonpartisan, and highly credible

evidence, she’s been using her three-criterion rubric to gauge her

instructional effectiveness throughout the school year. She’s been

routinely evaluating oral presentations with the rubric, then provid-

ing some form of individualized feedback. She’s been monitoring an

ever-growing file of rubric-based, peer-completed critiques. In other

words, although Cora chooses to carry out a fairly elaborate

pretest/post-test comparison in order to appraise her instructional

success, she also engages in a set of ongoing, less formal assessment-

based activities that allow her to monitor the quality of her teaching

and make sure that it remains strong.

Test Better, Teach Better Cora relied heavily on assessments as she made the many instruc-

tional decisions she was called on to make throughout the year. She

used the sample test items to help clarify the state’s curricular aims.

She used her own pretests to confirm her intuition about her students’

weak oral communication skills. She discovered from mid-year assess-

ments that she needed to continue to supply instruction related to

this skill because her students had not yet mastered it. She employed

an inventive blind-scored comparison of her students’ videotaped

pretest and post-test oral presentations to secure hard evidence that

her instruction related to this important skill was genuinely effective.

Cora also relied on short, special-purpose tests (such as the short quiz

dealing with subject-verb agreement) to guide her when she spotted

potential student deficits. And, happily, she will be moving next year

into the formal, anonymous assessment of her students’ affect.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 168

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

E p i l o g u e 1 6 9

Clearly, there is more to teaching than just testing. But if you, as a

teacher, recognize and take advantage of the dividends that derive

from instructionally focused testing, then your instruction will

almost always get better . . . and your students will almost always

learn more. Cora’s fictitious tale indicates several ways that testing

can help teaching. It almost always will.

epilog.qxd 7/10/2003 9:31 AM Page 169

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 3 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .