Assessing Progress

1
Assessing Progress
Chapter Fourteen

• The Quest to Improve Schools for All Children

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The No Child Left Behind Act (2001)

• The most far-reaching, controversial, and
  potentially expensive effort to reform public
  education, includes
• Accountability provisions, mainly accomplished
  through repeated testing of all students,
  especially in reading and math
• Uniform standards in all major content areas such
  that accountability measures can be effective

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Debate about the assessment focuses on

• What kinds of assessment
• What assessment actually means
• How assessment should be implemented
• How much time should be given to assessment
• Who decides the answers to all of the above

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Rationale for Broadened Definitions of Assessment

• Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in
  1983, the debate about how well our children are
  learning has become both ubiquitous and emotional
• This is the case despite the fact that the
  assessment of student progress has always been of
  central importance to educators

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Accountability and the Educational Standards
Movement

• Emerged as a result of a large number of studies
  of schooling in the 1980s
• President George H. W. Bush convened a national
  governors conference in 1989
• This group produced a document they called Goals
  2000, with suggestions for improving Americas
  schools in eight specific areas
• cont.

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• The National Council on Education Standards and
  Testing, convened by Congress in 1992, concluded
  that creating national standards and assessments
  was both feasible and highly desirable
• In1994, the goals from Goals 2000 were written
  into legislation, the Educate America Act, which
  awarded states additional money for education and
  gave them considerable flexibility in how the
  money could be spent
• cont.

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• The Educate America Act was based on five
  principles
• All students can learn
• Lasting improvements depend on school-based
  leadership
• Simultaneous top-down and bottom-up reform is
  necessary
• Strategies must be locally developed,
  comprehensive, and coordinated
• The whole community must be involved in
  developing strategies for improvement

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• Central to the whole idea were several beliefs
• States and local districts should set high
  standards for achievement
• Testing should be conducted to see how well
  students were achieving
• Schools, teachers, and students should be held
  accountable for results

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Conflicting Assumptions about Standards (Meier)

• Goals
• Authority
• Assessment
• Enforcement
• Equity
• Effective Learning

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Goals

• Conventional View it is possible and desirable
  to agree on a single definition of what
  constitutes a well-educated 18-year-old
• Alternative View In a democracy, there are
  multiple, legitimate definitions of a good
  education, and well-educated, and that
  plurality is desirable

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Authority

• Conventional View the task of defining well
  educated is best left to experts from the
  industry and the major academic disciplines
• Alternative View in fundamental questions of
  education, experts should be subservient to
  citizensincluding teachers, parents and other
  family members, and community members

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Assessment

• Conventional View with a single definition in
  place, it will be possible to compare individuals
  and schools across communities
• Alternative View standardized tests are too
  simple and simpleminded for high-stakes
  assessment of children and schools. Important
  decisions about schooling should always be based
  on multiple sources of data

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Enforcement

• Conventional View sanctions, too, need to be
  standardized, removed from local, self-interested
  parties
• Alternative View sanctions should remain in the
  hands of the local community, to be determined by
  people who know the particulars of each child and
  each situation

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Equity

• Conventional View expert-designed standards,
  imposed through tests, are the best way to
  achieve educational equity
• Alternative View a fairer distribution of
  resources is the principal means for achieving
  educational equity

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Effective Learning

• Conventional View clear-cut expectations,
  accompanied by automatic rewards and punishments
  will produce greater effort, and effort is the
  key to learning
• Alternative View improved learning can best be
  achieved by improved teaching and learning
  relationships, by enlisting the energies of both
  teachers and learners

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The Case for Standardized Testing

• Based on the belief that American students are
  not competing well with students from other
  industrialized nations
• One argument for why this is so is that American
  schools are too child-centered and have too much
  variety in curriculum
• A second argument is that poor, immigrant, and
  minority students are not being served well by
  American schools testing is perceived as a means
  to improve that service

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The Case for Standardized Testing

• The appeal of objective and standardized tests is
  strong among business and government leaders
• The belief in standardized tests rests on a
  conviction that they actually measure learning
• Requirements for the reporting of standardized
  test scores now include reporting scores by race
  and income
• Reports are also required to indicate gaps
  between and progress of various subgroups

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The Case against Standardized Testing

• Concerned educators and some well-informed
  politicians question the benefits of standardized
  tests based on
• A gap between the stated purpose of a test and
  what it actually measures
• A possibility of cultural bias in the questions
  on a given test
• Questionable uses of standardized tests
• The narrow approach and application of tests

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The Case against Standardized Testing

• Critics also argue that standardized tests cannot
  measure complex thinking skills that they often
  neglect both the context in which knowledge and
  skills can be used and that they cannot measure
  the ability to connect one idea to another
• Two results are common
• Students often dont recognize out-of-context
  questions,
• Students thinking skills, ability to solve
  problems, and ability to synthesize are not well
  tested

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The Case for Multiple Forms of Assessment

• Three ideas are central to the argument for
  multiple forms of assessment
• Students must leave schools with more than
  low-level basic knowledge
• Young people must learn the skills of cooperation
  and collaboration for life in an interdependent
  world
• Greater accuracy in assessment across cultural
  groups must be achieved

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The Case for Multiple Forms of Assessment

• Proponents argue that teachers are most often the
  best judges of student performance
• Teachers, however, must develop the skills
  necessary to make informed and accurate judgments
  in a variety of contexts and across a variety of
  groups
• Comprehensive approaches and methods of
  assessment must be developed

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Characteristics of Classrooms That Use Multiple
Forms of Assessment

• It is important to distinguish between assessment
  and testing
• Assessment implies a comprehensive,
  individualized evaluation of a persons strengths
  and weaknesses it is formative, used as feedback
  to both teachers and students
• Testing implies standardization it compares an
  individuals scores to others scores it tends
  to be summative, a final statement

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Pedagogies Old and New

• Teaching and learning activities are often
  project-based, open-ended, and ongoing
• Students and teachers discuss progress on complex
  problems
• There is an assumption that the entire community
  might have access to student work

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Roles Old and New

• Students have a substantial hand in determining
  their own work and evaluations
• In the development of portfolios, teachers and
  students work together to select those elements
  of the students work that best demonstrates
  learning and/or mastery
• Parents may become active in the evaluation
  process by being encouraged to review their
  childs work and make comments or suggestions to
  the teacher

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Place of Content Knowledge Old and New

• In classrooms that use multiple forms of
  assessment, content knowledge is most often
  acquired in pursuit of other, project-based goals
• Effective teachers provide the context and
  environment in which students acquire knowledge
  that goes beyond their current experienceeven
  beyond any perceived need to know something
• Student work may be used as content to teach
  others

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Assessment Old and New

• Often, teachers and students work together to
  arrive at acceptable standards for good work
• Students are evaluated on their ability to solve
  problems, to clearly demonstrate how thinking was
  done, or on how well they have collaborated with
  others
• Time limits and criteria of acceptability are
  often broader or more flexible
• Multiple conferences with parents are often an
  ongoing part of the assessment process

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Perspectives on Means for Assessing Student
Learning

• Among all the issues involved in assessment,
  several stand out as truly basic. Chief among
  these are the importance of criteria in any kind
  of assessment, and the issue of the reasons for
  grading.

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The Importance of Criteria

• Determining the specific criteria for
  satisfactory performance is critical because in
  alternative forms of assessment there may be more
  than one right answer
• Educators must ask themselves
• What does it mean to master a specific ability or
  skill?
• What would a student who has mastered a concept
  or skill be able to do?

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The Importance of Criteria

• Making judgments about the appropriateness of
  student responses and other work requires that
  teachers a) know the criteria well, and b) are
  able to see student work from a variety of
  angles
• Communicating achievement to students and parents
  is also important
• Conferences are useful, as are collections of
  work over time
• Assigning a single grade, however, is often
  difficult, if not impossible

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The Issue of Grading

• Grading and reporting were virtually unknown
  until the middle of the 1800s
• Most of western history, students were questioned
  orally, in part to see where students needed more
  work
• Grading emerged as school populations grew, and
  as new ideas of scientific measurement gained
  popularity
• The point of grading was to see a finish point
  in the students acquisition of knowledge

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• Grading may have multiple purposes
• Grading to sort or to categorize students into
  groups sometimes for instruction, sometimes for
  promotion
• Grading to motivate the idea that students will
  work harder to get a better grade
• Grading as feedback so that students can learn
  more effectively

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Perspectives on Multiple Forms of Assessment
Demand vs. Support

• Alfie Kohn suggests that certain classroom
  orientations distinguish between
• what we expect (demand) students to do,
• what we as educators can do to help (support)
  student learning

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• In the demand model
• Students are perceived as workers who are obliged
  to do a better job
• Students who do not succeed are said to have
  chosen not to study or not to have earned a given
  grade
• Responsibility is removed from the teacher and
  attention is deflected away from the curriculum
  and the context in which learning is supposed to
  occur

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• In the support model
• The assumption is that students are active
  contributors to the learning process
• Teachers are responsible for guiding and
  stimulating students natural curiosity and
  desire to learn
• Teaching and learning become child- or
  student-centered
• The goal is to help students build on their
  desire to make sense of and become competent in
  their world

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Ethical Issues

• All assessment is inherently subjective, which
  may not be an entirely bad thing
• When subjectivity becomes biased, however,
  ethical issues emerge
• Labeling of children for special education
  services, for example, may be necessary, but can
  also result in overrepresentation of ethnic and
  language minority students
• Standardized testing often results in the
  assignment of inaccurate labels

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Ethical Issues

• Attributions made on the basis of any kind of
  assessment may, like attributions made in order
  to categorize anyone because of culture, or
  language, or disability, may be flawed by
  prejudice
• Any assessment should take into consideration the
  fact that children develop at different rates
• Assessments made too quickly, on insufficient
  data, can also be inaccurate, misleading, and
  damaging

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Something to Think About

• In many ways, an individuals cultural
  experiences (defined broadly) determine
• the kinds of abilities that are important and are
  learned
• as well as the context and strategies in which
  they are expressed.

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