Considering the Options

• In Event: Enhancing Parents' and Policy-Makers' Assessment Literacy: Considering the Options

Abstract

Presenter 1 Summary
The proposed symposium’s initial presentation will be made by an emeritus professor who has been a long-time advocate of assessment literacy. Yet, the focus of his efforts has historically been on increasing the assessment literacy of teachers and school administrators, not the two target audiences addressed in this session. Because he will also be serving as timekeeper and, when necessary, moderator for the proposed session, he will initially describe the structure of the symposium—and will thereby alert attendees to their upcoming participation in a small-group session—arriving in less than an hour. The remainder of his presentation time will be devoted to the isolation of recommended real-world options for promoting assessment literacy for educational policymakers and parents of school-age children.
Although Presenter 1 has written a number of books intended to enhance readers’ assessment skills and knowledge, he regards the two audiences to be treated in the proposed symposium as constituting a pair of particularly challenging, yet influential targets. Given the proposed session’s intention to arrive at practicable and readily implementable ways of reaching policymakers and parents of students currently in school (or parents of younger children soon to enter school), he has never previously addressed the assessment needs of these two target groups in tandem—and looks forward to doing so.
He will, not surprisingly, draw on the views expressed in his previously published books and articles dealing wholly, or at least dominantly, with educational measurement. In 2000, for example, he wrote a general-market book about assessment specifically for parents of children in our nation’s schools. Then, too, during the past quarter century, he has written several books—four in multi-revised editions—dealing with educational assessment from the perspective of classroom teachers and school or district educational administrators. Although the strategies suitable for use in promoting the assessment literacy of policymakers and parents will, clearly, need to differ from the strategies employed when promulgating assessment literacy among educators, some elements of those two strategies will be identical. Presenter 1 will conclude his analysis by isolating the “sames” and “differents” when promoting assessment literacy for different target audiences.

Author

• W. James Popham, University of California - Los Angeles