Standards-Based Assessment—
Nurturing Learning Readings
Nurturing Learning Readings
Assessment—Where the Rubber Meets the Road in Standards-Based Education
Why is there such strong belief in the power of assessment to motivate changes in teaching and learning? The logic appears relatively simple:
- Assessments are the final word in defining what educators and the community want students to know and be able to do. Regardless of what anyone says in their standards documents (or in course outcomes), the assessments define what was really meant. So, assessments communicate the standards to which school systems, schools, teachers, and students aspire;
- These standards provide focus and direction for teaching and learning;
- Results from assessments support important insights on the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of student progress relative to the standards;
- Educators and students can use this feedback to understand and direct their attention to improving relevant aspects of student learning;
- Participating in the assessment itself can be a powerful episode of learning for both teachers and students; such participation can directly affect instruction and student achievement.
The power of assessment to influence teaching and learning isn't always positive. Just consider some of the negative consequences from past over-reliance on standardized multiple-choice tests. Under pressure to help students do well on such tests, teachers and administrators tended to focus their efforts on test content, mimic the tests' multiple-choice formats in classroom curriculum, and devote more and more time to preparing students to do well on the tests. The net effect was a narrowing of the curriculum to the basic skills assessed and a neglect of complex thinking skills and other subject areas which were not assessed.
This is why assessment is such an important part of the standards-based reform efforts which are going on across the country. Nearly every state and many, many local districts and schools are engaged in both setting rigorous standards that define what students should know and be able to do for future success and developing assessment systems to mirror these high standards. Through these assessments, states, districts and schools are trying to support and promote the attainment of their standards.
| Reference Box:
For further reading on the importance of assessment in education see: Joan Herman, Assessing New Assessments: How Do They Measure Up?, 1990, Los Angeles: UCLA Graduate School of Education, (310) 206-1532. For further reading on the effect of multiple-choice tests on instruction see: H.D. Corbett and B.L. Wilson, Testing, Reform, and Rebellion, 1991, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. For further reading on the ways that classroom assessment can affect students see: Francine Stayter and Peter Johnston, "Evaluating the Teaching and Learning of Literacy," in Timothy Shanahan, (Ed.), Reading and Writing Together: New Perspectives for the Classroom, 1990, Christopher-Gordon Publishers. |
For a more personal, classroom-based example, consider these thoughts by Francine Staytor and Peter Johnston:
What we choose to evaluate and how we choose to evaluate delivers powerful messages to students about those things we value. Students view their learning and their sense of worth through the lens we help them construct unless they cannot bear to look through it.
The authors then give many examples of these messages, such as focusing on errors rather than on strengths, focusing on conventions rather than meaning, and projecting the image that the teacher is the only one that has the knowledge and ownership of the correct response.
Learning From the Past
If what one gets is what one assesses, then we all need to make sure that our assessments truly reflect our standards for student accomplishment, clearly communicate the important things we want students to know and be able to do, and encourage reflective teaching. Many of the current trends in assessment (such as more emphasis on alternative forms of assessment—performance assessment, senior projects, portfolios) are attempts to do just this. Many people believe that the characteristics of alternative assessment reflect current understanding of how students learn best, and are more able to assess the kinds of student learnings that we increasingly feel are important to be successful in the 21st century. These abilities include:
- · Applying knowledge by creating, designing, producing, and performing
- · Tapping more complex thinking and problem solving skills
- · Requiring real life applications
- · Requiring real people, rather than machines, to judge the quality of student work
If educators have learned anything from the past 60 years of testing, it is this: If we want our assessments to have positive consequences, we first have to have a clear vision of what we want our assessments to accomplish and then design the assessment to do it. This sequence is the essence of quality and is a major theme that will be visited many times throughout Toolkit98.
Toolkit98, and the Laboratory Network Program that led to its creation, recognizes the important role assessment plays in the educational improvement process. High quality assessment targeted at important goals for students supports planning for educational improvement. On the other hand, assessment that focuses on the wrong goals, models outmoded instructional practice, or is used for the same old purposes can impede reform.
For all these reasons, educators and educational policymakers are working to change the assessment of student achievement to reflect changes in the expectations and standards for students, in the methodologies and purposes of assessment, and in the instruction that assessment is intended to support. In Toolkit98, we refer to this evolving type of assessment as alternative assessment. As noted in the Introduction, the definition we rely upon is:
Alternative assessment includes any type of assessment in which students create a response to a question rather than choose a response from a given list (e.g., multiple-choice, true/false, or matching). Alternative assessments can include short answer questions, essays, performances, oral presentations, demonstrations, exhibitions, and portfolios.
Also, as noted in the Introduction, even though Toolkit98 emphasizes alternative assessment, this does not imply that only alternative assessments are worthwhile and all previous assessment efforts are worthless. The key to successful decision making is to provide a comprehensive assessment of important student goals, using the most appropriate combination of assessment tools to do so.*
Rationale for Alternative Assessment
Why do educators need alternative assessments? There are a variety of reasons detailed in this section.
| Reference Box:
Joan Herman, Pam Aschbacher, and Lynn Winters, A Practical Guide to Alternative Assessment, 1992, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD),
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Changes in Valued Student Outcomes. Standards and assessments of student achievement are changing because students face a world that will demand new skills and abilities. Society's knowledge base has grown exponentially over the last few decades, and continues to do so. With the volume of information doubling every three years, there are too many facts to learn.
Given this pace, no one individual can be expected to keep up with the information flow in a single discipline, much less across disciplines. Such a knowledge explosion makes futile most attempts to have students memorize and regurgitate large bodies of facts.
Economic trends also push us away from a fact-based curriculum. The shift from a manufacturing- to an information- and service-based economy requires that individuals have skills in accessing and using information and in working with people. These changes in the workforce and in the pace and complexity of modern life suggest that people will need to be flexible, to shift jobs frequently, and to adapt to change. To prepare students for success in the future, schools must emphasize how to apply rather than just acquire information. (Herman, et. al, 1992, p. 14)
In the future, students will need to know how to access the information they need and apply it to real-life situations. Students will face many situations where there will be no clear-cut right answer, but where, instead, they will need to analyze the situation and apply their knowledge and skills to find a solution that will work. Yes, knowledge and facts will still be important, but they simply are not sufficient to prepare students for future success. Today's assessments therefore need to measure not only the basics, but also a student's ability to think critically, analyze, and make inferences—skills found in the "content standards" adopted recently by a variety of national commissions. In these efforts, expectations for students reflect an increasing emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving, the ability to monitor one's own performance, the efficiency with which tasks are accomplished, group collaboration, and communication skills. Such abilities are difficult to measure in multiple-choice format; practitioners need alternatives.
| Reference Box:
For a summary and compilation of content standards across a variety of disciplines see: John Kendall and Robert Marzano, Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K-12 Education, 1997, McREL, (303) 337-0990, http://www.mcrel.org/ In this compendium, the authors note, "There is clearly not a consensus across groups as to what form 'standards' should take or how they should be used. The result is that the character, scope, and level of detail provided in standards often vary significantly from one subject area to another." For a history of national standards development see: Robert Marzano and John Kendall, Designing Standards-Based Districts, States, Schools and Classrooms, 1996, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), (800) 933-2723. For skill standards used in career-technical education visit: http://www.nssb.org/ossp.html or click on the STW Links button at http://www.stw.ed.gov/ For those interested in standards from various states, see: http://putwest.boces.org/Standards.html#Section3 |
In a thinking curriculum, students develop an in-depth understanding of the essential concepts and processes for dealing with those concepts, similar to the approach taken by experts in tackling their tasks. For example, students use original sources to construct historical accounts; they design experiments to answer their questions about natural phenomena; they use mathematics to model real- world events and systems; and they write for real audiences. (Herman et al., 1992, p.17)
Changes in Notions of Competence. Notions of competence and expertise are also becoming more refined. For example, the definition of what it means to be a good reader has changed over time. Now it is not enough just to be able to convert symbols on the page to sound. To read at the levels necessary to be functionally literate in tomorrow's world, students need to be able to draw inferences, relate current information to past information, have a variety of efficient reading strategies, know when they are not understanding, and so forth. These skills are very difficult to measure in fixed-response format because it is not just a matter of testing separate skills, but also a matter of assessing a student's ability to know how and when to use a variety of skills collectively to accomplish a reading goal.
Similarly, traditional science courses required students to learn vocabulary and memorize basic scientific principles. Today, people recognize that memorizing formulas does not necessarily result in "expertise" and may, in fact, be detrimental to the development of expertise. Students must understand and be able to apply those scientific principles to real-life problems. More science classrooms today look like laboratories where students are learning by doing. Science assessments are beginning to change from mere vocabulary tests to assessments that enable students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding of the material.
Changes in Teaching and Learning That Are Communicated by Assessment. Teachers, parents, and students develop an understanding of what is valued in education by virtue of what is assessed and how it is assessed. For example, when multiple-choice tests are used exclusively, it gives the impression that there is only one right answer to every question and that there is always a right answer. Kober (1993) observes the following messages from many past multiple-choice, norm-referenced, traditional science tests:
a. Because they have a single right or wrong answer, they reinforce the misleading conception of science as a static body of facts
b. Because their results rank individual student performance against that of a larger group, they perpetuate the notion that only a few students—the top scorers—are smart enough to pursue science
c. Because they sample a breadth of content in a superficial and unconnected way, traditional tests actually reward instruction that drills students on low level facts and vocabulary recognition**
| Reference Box:
For more information on current knowledge about instruction and the learning process see: N. Kober, 7. National Education Knowledge Industry Association—NEKIA, (formerly Council for Educational Development and Research), (202) 429-5101. |
Such "traditional" assessment goes along with a view that teachers are providers of knowledge and students are passive recipients of that knowledge. Research says, however, that different instructional approaches are required if students are to acquire the thinking skills needed for tomorrow's world. Current research indicates that good instruction engages students actively in the learning process.
Current evidence makes it clear that instruction emphasizing structured drill and practice on isolated facts and skills does students a major disservice. Insisting that students demonstrate a certain level of arithmetic mastery before being allowed to enroll in algebra or that they learn how to write a good paragraph before tackling an essay are examples of this discrete skills approach. Such learning out of context makes it more difficult to organize and remember the information being presented. Applying taught skills later when solving real-world problems also becomes more difficult. Students who have trouble mastering decontextualized 'basics' are often put in remedial classes or groups and are not given the opportunity to tackle complex and meaningful tasks. (Herman et al; 1992, p.15)
Assessment must change to support new directions in instruction. What kind of reinforcement do teachers receive for making necessary changes in classroom practice if the outcomes assessed by the tests do not cover the full range of desired outcomes and the procedures don't correspond to what is known about sound instruction?
Changes in the Purposes of Assessment. Assessment in the past was most frequently used for sorting students: grading, selection into special programs, assignment to instructional groups, identification of the highest and lowest performing students, and so forth. Different skills were expected of students depending on their ability.
In today's information age, all students need to meet high standards in order to succeed in the world. Educational assessment can no longer primarily play a sorting role. Rather, assessment must help identify the assets of students on which effective educational programs can be built. It must also identify the characteristics that are likely to interfere with the student's learning so that the school or college may help overcome these difficulties.
Today, knowing that one student ranks higher than another is less important than knowing how both students' performances compare with our ultimate goals for performance. It is important for assessments to describe student performance well enough so that students and teachers know how students are progressing toward agreed upon goals. The standard is no longer "doing better than the rest," but rather meeting a previously agreed upon, rigorous level of knowledge and skills. In short, the major purposes of assessment are to improve student learning and inform instruction.
Changes in the Importance of Authenticity. Multiple-choice test results are "stand-ins" or proxies for the actual performance of interest. For example, educators could use a multiple-choice test to assess knowledge about how to give an oral presentation. If the student does well on the knowledge test, we might infer that the student could actually do a good oral presentation. Performance on the multiple-choice test is therefore a proxy for the actual performance. However, although students who do well on multiple-choice tests tend to perform better as well, the correlation does not hold for all students or all occasions. To use a multiple-choice test as the exclusive measure of a student's ability to give an oral presentation ignores the need to assess the application of that understanding in an actual performance task and is likely to constrain instruction to what is on the multiple-choice test. Now, one might think that giving an oral presentation is a silly example—of course one would need to have a student actually do an oral presentation. But the same logic applies to laboratory skills, writing, and a host of other complex skills we want students to master.
Modern theories of teaching and learning have demonstrated that students know, understand, and retain more when they learn in the context of real-life situations. They can also demonstrate the depth of that understanding when the task they are asked to perform mirrors a real-life situation. Educators recognize the need to give students more realistic tasks to do on assessments because they want to know if the students can apply their knowledge to more real-life situations, and because they don't know whether artificial situations really elicit the full range of what students are able to do.
Changes in the Recognition of the Critical Role of Teachers in Assessment. More attention is being paid to helping teachers prepare themselves for classroom assessment and classroom uses of alternative assessment for a number of reasons:
- Assessment is a frequently occurring activity in the classroom, yet teachers rarely are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need to assess well and to use assessment information to improve instruction.
- Teachers are at the heart of educational improvement. It is they who will administer and interpret the results of alternative assessments. If teachers don't feel a need for this information, or don't see how it can be used to improve student learning, their resistance may result in the same contamination of assessment results that occurs with more traditional large-scale assessments.
- Alternative assessment is not magic. Just having an alternative assessment in place won't automatically improve student achievement. Teachers will need to understand principles of assessment in order to ensure that new types of assessments are not misused or under-utilized. We need to build in those features that will make such assessments useful in the classroom, and then help teachers understand how to use them to improve the learning of their students. If we don't, the supposed impact of our alternative assessments may not materialize.
- Changes that matter occur in classrooms, in the day-to-day interactions between teachers and students. Properly designed alternative assessments can support changes in these interactions. Our knowledge of how students learn is increasing. Our assessments should reflect our new knowledge about teaching and learning.
| Related Toolkit98 Chapters and Activities:
Activities that relate to the rationale for changes in assessment are: Activity 1.1—Changing Assessment Practices: What Difference Does it Make for Students?; Activity 1.4—Seeing Wholes; Activity 1.6—A Comparison of Multiple-Choice and Alternative Assessment; and Activity 1.12—Assessment Principles. |
With the increasing demands placed on teachers, support given through time and professional development is critical to the success of any educational improvement effort. Toolkit98 is designed to provide one resource to help ensure that teachers will receive the support they need to use assessment in the service of instructional improvement.
Summary
The rationale for alternative assessment and a description of the way it fits into current efforts to improve student achievement is summarized very nicely by the following quotation:
The area of achievement assessment has been undergoing major changes during the past few years. A shift has taken place from what some call a "culture of testing" to a "culture of assessment." A strong emphasis is put on integrating assessment and instruction, on assessing process rather than just products and on evaluating individual progress relative to each student's starting point. The position of the student…has also been changing…to that of an active participant who shares responsibility in the process, practices self-evaluation, reflections, and collaboration and conducts a continuous dialogue with the teachers. The [assessment] task is often interesting, meaningful, authentic and challenging….All these changes are part of a school restructuring process, meant to develop self-motivated and self-regulated learners and intended to make learning a more mindful and meaningful experience which is responsive to individual differences among the learners. This shift reflects an "overall assessment prophecy" which holds that it is no longer possible to consider assessment only as a means of determining which individuals [can adapt] to mainstream educational practice….[Now] rather than requiring individuals to adapt to means of instruction, the desired objective is to adapt the means of instruction to individuals in order to maximize their potential for success….The new assessment alternatives being developed enhance the possibilities for adaptation.... (Birenbaum and Douchy, 1996, p. xiii)
| Reference Box:
Menucha Birenbaum and Filip Douchy, 1996. Alternative in Assessment of Achievements, Learning Processes and Prior Knowledge. Kluwer Academic Publishers, (781) 871-6600. |
The Need for Quality
Given the important role assessment plays in education (and educational reform efforts), it behooves everyone to make sure that assessments are of high quality. It's perfectly possible to design poor quality alternative assessments and use the results for the wrong purposes. Therefore, we're going to back up a little and talk about what good assessment looks like in general. We'll consider all forms of assessment, not just alternative forms of assessment.