State Assessment Systems Exploring Best Practices and Innovations: Summary of Two Workshops (2010) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
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The history of state assessments has been eventful. Education officials have developed their own assessments, have purchased ready-made assessments produced by private companies and nonprofit orga nizations, and have collaborated to share the task of test development.
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. The goal for the two workshops documented in this report was to collect information and perspectives on assessment to help state officials and others as they review current assessment practices and consider improvements.
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Many of the sessions at the two workshops delved fairly deeply into tech nical issues and the practical aspects of developing and running a state assess ment system, although the committee's broader goal was to raise provocative questions about the fundamental roles that assessment and accountability play in promoting high-quality teaching and learning to rigorous content and performance standards. In particular, the committee hoped to focus attention on the significant potential that recent research in the learning sciences has to reframe both approaches to assessment and expectations for what assessments can contribute.
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The idea that assessments should be used to evaluate not only individual students' progress, but also the quality of instruction and the performance of educators more generally, is one with longstanding roots, Joan Herman noted. Edward Thorndike, who published pioneering books on educational measure ment in the first decades of the 20th century, viewed his work as useful in part because it would provide principals and teachers with a tool for improving student learning.
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, but, taken together, different students' responses to different questions support inferences about how well the group as a whole has learned each aspect of the domain tested. One advantage of matrix sampling is that each student takes fewer test items -- because student-level scores are not produced -- which allowed devel opers to include more complex item types.
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Interim assessments are often explicitly designed to mimic the format and coverage of state tests. They may be used not only to guide instruction, but also to predict student performance on sum mative state assessments, to provide data on a program or approach, or to provide diagnostic information about a particular student.
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Moreover, she said, studies are needed to provide technical and other validity evidence to support inferences made from interim assessments. In surveys, teachers have reported that the results of interim assessments helped them monitor student progress and identify skill gaps for their students and led them to modify curriculum and instruction (Clune and White, 2008; Stecher et al., 2008; Christman et al., 2009)
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Marion reported that most states have seen an approximately three-fold increase in testing requirements without a corresponding increase in personnel (Government Accounting Office, 2003; Toch, 2006)
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However, the law did not, in his view, provide adequate financial support for ongoing operational costs. He also said that there has been insufficient oversight of technical quality, so that the validity of particular assessments for particular purposes has received inadequate attention.
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Improved Reporting The combination of stricter reporting requirements under NCLB and improved technology has led states and districts to pay more atten tion to their reporting systems since 2002. Some have made marked improve ments in presenting data in ways that are easy for users to understand and use to make effective decisions.5 Weaknesses Greater Reliance on Multiple-Choice Tests In comparison with the assessments of the 1990s, today's state assessments are less likely to measure complex learn ing.
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Insufficient Rigor Many researchers and analysts regard current state assessments as insufficiently rigorous. Analysis of their cognitive demand suggests that they tend to focus on the lower levels of cognitive demands as defined in state standards and that they are less difficult than, for example, NAEP (see, e.g., Ho, 2008; Cronin et al., 2009)
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System Capacity Looking more broadly at the capacity issue, Marion noted again that here has been a "three- or four-fold increase in the number of tests that are given without any corresponding increase in assessment person nel." Yet performance or other kinds of innovative assessments require more person-hours at most stages of the process than do multiple-choice assessments. These issues were discussed in the next session of the workshop, described in Chapter 2.
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INTRODUCTION Reporting of Results Although there have been improvements in reporting, it has generally received the least attention of any aspect of the assessment system. NCLB has specific reporting requirements, and many jurisdictions have better data systems and better technology as a result.
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