A Public Relations Campaign to Sell a New Vision of Excellence in Assessment

• In Event: Enhancing American Educators’ Assessment Literacy: Three Contending Game Plans

Abstract

For well over a quarter of a century, American educators have been continually pummeled regarding their lack of understandings about the basics of educational assessment. Why is this? It probably results from some combination of (1) a lack of resources to provide the requisite training and (2) a lack of societal awareness of the potential power of assessment literacy to improve school quality.
One way to address this issue is to increase awareness of breakthroughs in assessment and, thus, turn members of the public into advocates for needed resources. In fact, we have a new assessment story to tell America and that story—when told properly—becomes the key to our securing resources for assessment literacy’s development. The symposium’s final presenter, therefore, will propose a new vision of excellence assessment ensconced in a powerful public relations campaign offered in collaboration with practitioners—both teachers and school leaders.
This sharply focused campaign can be built around three revolutionary ideas. Its purpose is to show our communities that, because our sense of sound assessment practice has advanced dramatically, we must showcase its power. With minimal initial preparation, this campaign can be conducted by practitioners. Clearly, many teachers, school leaders, and their professional associations are fed up with the current state of our assessment affairs and would be willing players in such an effort. Moreover, their meaningful involvement would both initiate and ensure the development of U.S. educators’ assessment literacy.
Revolutionary idea #1 commits us to balancing our use of assessment resources to meet the long-neglected information needs of students, teachers and school leaders in the service of supporting and verifying learning; that is, to use assessment resources for far more than accountability purposes. We know how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of classroom, interim, and annual assessments in relation to students’ learning success. The power of balanced local assessment systems used to meet the information needs of all key assessment users must be made obvious to the public.
Revolutionary idea #2 links assessment to student academic well-being, self-efficacy, motivation, and learning success in dramatic new ways. By engaging students in ongoing self-assessment and reflection while they are learning, in effect, we replace assessment for anxiety and intimidation (as has been our tradition) with assessment for confidence and learning. Again, the achievement gains to be expected from this change have been well documented.
Revolutionary idea #3 takes the actual assessment process out of its traditional realm of technical complexity (unapproachable by teachers) and into the reality of life in real world classrooms. This is accomplished with the development of practical standards of assessment quality teachers and school leaders can make operational day to day in their schools and classrooms—commonsense assessment ideas described using everyday language. Translations of complex validity, reliability, and fairness standards have been completed and are readily available to support assessment literacy development.
This final presentation will be concluded with analysis of how best to coalesce these three pivotal ideas into a major, make-a-difference public relations campaign.

Author

• Rick Stiggins, Michigan State University