Assessment In The Classroom

Constructing And Interpreting Texts

George Cunnningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135711849
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Educational assessment, at one time a relatively uncontroversial subject, is now riven by a diversity of views. The most crucial division is between those who continue to believe in the effectiveness of objective assessment techniques and those who favour alternative methods. This book presents an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses and rationales for both.

1
Introduction

In this chapter students will:

• learn why assessment is becoming increasingly important in our society;
• learn about the barriers that prevent good assessment practices; understand why teachers need to be better prepared to use assessment techniques;
• become familiar with the Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students;
• understand the importance of assessment for decision making;
• know the requirements for good assessment procedures; and
• understand fundamental principles of measurement and assessment.

Education has gradually become one of the premier public policy issues in the United States. This has occurred in the presence of both hope and despair. The hope stems from the long held faith that education can solve the nation’s social problems. Unemployment, drug use, unwanted teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases are all problems that seem amenable to amelioration in our public schools. The despair stems from evidence that suggests that just when the need for better education is being most keenly felt, our schools are failing.

One of the earliest and most strident criticisms of American education appeared in a report commissioned by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, titled A Nation at Risk (1983). The report was prepared under the direction of Terrel Bell, Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration. The report is replete with references to the failure of American education and includes the following famous quote, ‘If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance, that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.’ Many other similar critical analyses of American schools followed. A further expression of this concern can be found in The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education written by Harold W.Stevenson and James W.Stigler. In this study of Asian schools, the superior science and math performance of students in these countries is described. The most interesting part of the book is not the documentation of the differences in achievement between students from the two parts of the world, but the delineation of the reasons why this gap has emerged. The authors cite the existence of a single widely accepted curriculum and widespread commitment to the value of education as key reasons for the superior performance of Asian students.

There is also strong dissent from the view that our schools are in a downward spiral. These voices range from Gerald Bracey (in a series of columns and articles that have appeared in the Phi Delta Kappan); the Sandia Report, commissioned by the Bush administration to demonstrate the need for a large scale revamping of the nations schools which declared that pronouncements about the demise of public education were premature; and the recent book written by David C.Berliner and Bruce Biddle titled The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools.

Despite the differences in the ways our schools are perceived, the belief that our schools need to be changed is widespread. Ideas about how to improve the educational performance of our students have coalesced into the educational reform movement. A critical characteristic of most educational reform agendas is accountability. In practice this means a demand for more testing and/or different assessment techniques.

Many proposals for educational reform call for the increased use of alternative assessment, that is student evaluation techniques that go beyond the traditional pencil and paper techniques of true-false, multiple-choice, short answer and fill-in-the-blanks. Alternate assessment techniques usually include such techniques as performance tests and portfolios (both of these are discussed in Chapter 6). Another important aspect of educational reform is the need for increased participation by teachers in decision-making. As a result, teachers need to become sophisticated about the assessment issues surrounding decision-making.

Many teachers lack the skills necessary to effectively use assessment techniques or understand the assessment related issues associated with educational reform. The principles of measurement are technical, mathematical, and obscure. Those outside the field often find the code difficult to break. Even when assessment procedures are well understood, their implementation can be time consuming. Considering the amount of work they are required to do each day, teachers often conclude that it is not worthwhile for them to devote so much of their energy to developing their assessment skills.

The most obvious reason for the inadequate measurement skills of teachers is a lack of assessment courses in teacher certification programs. States, colleges, and universities responsible for the overall training of teachers, typically do not require coursework in assessment in their teacher education programs. Only fifteen states specifically include the successful completion of such courses for certification (Sullivan and Chalnick, 1991). Most states permit teacher training institutions to set higher standards, but only about half of these institutions have done so (Schafer and Lissitz, 1987). Furthermore, pre-service instruction in assessment has not been adequately augmented by appropriate in-service programming and follow-up studies of teaching practices, suggest that teachers have not retained or been willing to apply what they have learned. This lack of attention to assessment skills is not the result of difficulty in identifying what is most important, since the basic precepts of measurement and testing are well documented and accepted.

Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students

In 1987, professional educational associations began developing a set of standards for evaluating teacher competence in student assessment. These organizations included the American Federation of Teachers, the National Council on Measurement in Education and the National Education Association. Work was completed on this document in 1990 and it was disseminated widely. It also was published in Educational Measurement: Issues and Practices (1990). These standards are not copyrighted and the committee that wrote this document encourages their widespread distribution.

The standards are based on two assumptions: (1) student assessment is an integral part of a teacher’s role, and (2) good teaching and good testing go together. The impetus for the development of these standards came from the perception that teachers are not currently being well prepared in classroom assessment skills. Since accountability and assessment are included in educational reform programs, teachers need to prepare themselves for participation as knowledgeable decision-makers. Seven standards were proposed that are intended to prepare teachers to correctly use assessment techniques in their teaching, and better function in decision-making roles that require a knowledge of assessment.

1 Teachers should be skilled in choosing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions.

The implementation of this standard requires that teachers become aware of the importance of assessment in instruction, and be knowledgeable about the wide range of assessment techniques that can be used to make better instructional decisions. Teachers also need to be able to evaluate the commercially prepared tests that accompany instructional materials. They should know that these tests must be evaluated separately from the instructional material itself. Teachers need to be able to differentiate between good and bad assessment methods, in terms of their technical characteristics such as reliability and validity, and through the use of less formal, more subjective standards for evaluating overall quality.

Choosing the most appropriate assessment requires an understanding of the sort of decisions that will be made using the results of the assessment. In too many situations, tests are created and administered without any explicit delineation of why the assessment is being conducted.

2 Teachers should be skilled in developing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions.

Since teachers create most of the assessment tools they use, they need to be knowledgeable about test construction techniques. They should possess a wide range of skills encompassing a variety of approaches to the collection of assessment information on students. This knowledge should include both an understanding of formal and informal assessment methods.

3 Teachers should be skilled in administering, scoring, and interpreting the results of both externally produced and teacher-produced assessment methods.

Teachers need to possess the technical skills necessary to administer the assessment tools they are using. They also need to be able to correctly score and interpret them. Test scoring is seldom a problem when standardized tests are used because they can be machine scored accurately with the results reported to teachers in the form of standard scores. The evaluation of essay and performance tests may require enhanced skills not always possessed by teachers. Training and supervised practice in this type of assessment is particularly important when the results of the assessment will be used to make important decisions.

4 Teachers should be skilled in using assessment results when making decisions about individual students, planning teaching, developing curriculum, and school improvement.

Teachers should be able to select the most appropriate assessment tools for making instructional decisions and be able to use the information appropriately. The accomplishment of this goal requires a broad range of assessment knowledge and skills, including an understanding of how to match specific assessment techniques with instructional goals.

5 Teachers should be skilled in developing valid pupil grading procedure which use pupil assessments.

Teachers should be able to provide a rational basis for assigning grades. The explanation needs to be understood by both students and parents. Teachers should avoid grading methods that are justified by the need to adhere to existing policies or ‘because these grading procedures have always been used.’ In many cases, the grading methods that have been used in the past are less than ideal. Problems with grading often arise because teachers are unaware that there are alternative methods of assigning grades and/or that the approaches used in their school by other teachers are inappropriate.

6 Teachers should be skilled in communicating assessment results to students, parents, other lay audiences, and other educators.

This standard requires that teachers be familiar with the interpretation and use of standardized scores. They need to be able to articulate to parents and the community what these scores mean as well as how and why the scores on subscales differ. It is particularly important for teachers to be knowledgeable about the advantages and disadvantages of different standard scores and be able to communicate that knowledge to parents.

One of the most controversial aspects of the process of communicating results to parents and the public stems from the need to explain differences in performance among cultural-ethnic groups. Such communication needs to be handled with sensitivity. There is much that is not known about why student performance differs on such tests and teachers should be cautious about making generalizations about such matters. Teachers also need to be able to understand and explain how differences in student background can influence test performance.

7 Teachers should be skilled in recognizing unethical, illegal, and otherwise nappropriate assessment methods and uses of assessment information.

There are many ethical problems surrounding the administration of standardized achievement tests. They pose two particular kinds of problems for teachers: (1) opinions differ regarding what is and what is not ethical; and (2) teachers often find themselves under pressure to act unethically. This pressure usually stems from a demand for higher

test scores regardless of how they are obtained. Public officials, school boards, and principals—all the way down to the classroom teacher, feel this pressure.

Teachers need to approach student assessment with a commitment to fairness and employ the highest standards of ethical behavior. Ethical standards are particularly important for teachers because they are role models. When teachers violate the accepted standards of ethical behavior, we can hardly expect their students to be any better. Furthermore, when teachers use inappropriate or unethical assessment methods, students are likely to be the first to notice.

Awareness of ethical standards is not enough, teachers must make sure that their actions are guided by these standards. They also have a responsibility to ensure awareness and implementation of ethical practices in the larger community.

The Importance of Assessment in Decision Making

The need to make decisions is one of the most important characteristics of our world. In a sense, the capacity to make decisions is what makes us human. Teachers are required to make an enormous number of decisions during each school day, often in a short amount of time, and on the basis of what is known at the time. Assessment, both formal and informal, plays an important role in decision-making.

Formal assessments include conventional testing methods such as multiple-choice, true-false, short answer, and essay items and are characterized by precision and accuracy.

Informal assessments include such techniques as questioning, observing students while they work on tasks, asking students to read aloud or have them verbalize the working through of mathematics problems. Information obtained from these assessments lets teachers know whether their students understand the materials presented and assists them in making better decisions about what should be taught next. This can help the teacher decide whether there is a need for further review, or if the students are ready to have new material introduced. It also gives the teacher immediate feedback about the effectiveness of the teaching methods being employed. If students are not learning as they should, the teacher must decide whether or when to alter instructional methods.

Alternative assessment techniques represent an intermediate stage between the two. They lack the precision of formal assessments, but they are not as subjective as informal assessments.

Surveys of teacher behavior (Stiggins, Conklin, and Bridgeford, 1986) have shown that teachers prefer informal methods of assessment and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Appendices, Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Interpreting Test Results
• 3: Planning Classroom Assessments
• 4 Objective Test Items
• 5: Constructed Response Items
• 6: Alternative Assessment
• 7: Developing Valid Grading Procedures
• 8: Standardized Achievement Tests
• 9: The Ethics of Student Assessment
• Appendix A: Assumptions and scaling
• Appendix B: Computation of the standard deviation
• Appendix C: Description of the normal curve
• Appendix D: Computation of correlation coefficients
• Appendix E: Computation of percentiles
• Appendix F: Computing normalized T-scores
• Appendix G: Computation of coefficient alpha and KR-21
• References