Classroom Assessment in the Context of High-Stakes Testing

• In Event: Research on Classroom Assessment: Laying the Foundation

Abstract

To determine what students know and can do in relation to prescribed state standards teachers must collect accurate evidence about student learning from a variety of sources such as formative and summative classroom assessments, interim benchmark assessments, and summative large scale assessments. Next, teachers must analyze the evidence from these sources to determine how best to change instruction to address student misconceptions or confusions about content. Based upon research findings regarding teachers’ skills in analyzing student work, it is likely that drawing conclusions about student skills using multiple assessment sources is challenging for teachers-- especially if findings across assessment sources are not consistent.
Optimally, teacher feedback to students regarding their mastery of a learning target is derived from assessments that use sound assessment construction principals and are accurately aligned to state standards. Research findings indicate, however, that although classroom, interim benchmark, and large scale assessments are often believed to be measuring the same construct (the state standards) the observed knowledge, skills, processes measured by these assessments may differ. When the target of measurement differs across these three types of assessments, teachers, students, and parents may receive mixed messages about what the student is actually able to do. When this occurs, the ability of the teacher to summarize information to assist student learning may be hindered.
If teachers, professional development specialists, and classroom assessment researchers are to bring robust assessment practices into the classroom, they need to be aware of the research based practices large scale assessments use to interpret state standards so that the target of measure and the evidence collected for that target is conceptualized in the same way from the classroom to the standardized large scale assessment. Stated another way, teachers and large scale assessment developers need to (a) have the same the interpretations of the standards (b) identify the same types of student achievement as evidence of mastery of the standards, and (c) collect evidence using the same types of robust practices when building assessments.
As stakeholders continue to diversify the intended uses of high stakes assessments, it becomes increasingly important that stakeholders share how items are aligned to standards from a content and cognitive rigor perspective. The purpose of this paper is to describe research findings from classroom assessment, cognitive psychology, and large scale assessment areas that can be used to provide a framework regarding how classroom, interim benchmark, and summative large scale assessments may be integrated into a cohesive assessment system. If an assessment system is to have systemic educational validity, the expectations for what good performance looks like for each specific learning target must be illuminated along with the common misconceptions associated with these learning targets.

Authors

• Christina Schneider, CTB/McGraw-Hill LLC

• Karla L. Egan, CTB/McGraw-Hill LLC