Nuts and Bolts of Assessment from Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know W.J. Popham

Definition of Educational Assessment A formal attempt to determine students’ status with respect to educational variables of interest.

Why teachers should know about assessment: To diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses To monitor students’ progress To assign grades to students To determine instructional effectiveness

Two significant reasons teachers should know about assessment. Assessment provides significant instructional-planning payoffs, such as a more clear understanding of what the students are meant to accomplish. This provides clarity of intention. Assessment provides the opportunity to monitor students’ progress which empirically impacts instruction positively.

Why teachers should know about assessment: Additional reasons for this generation-- Test results determine public perceptions of educational effectiveness Students’ assessment performances are increasingly seen as part of the teacher evaluation process As clarifiers of instructional intentions, assessment devices can improve instructional quality.

Formative assessment Much of the assessment we use will provide information regarding student readiness level and current understanding. These include: Pre-tests Questionnaires Practice activities Group work

Formative assessment While it is useful to record some formative assessments in order to demonstrate student progress, the primary purpose of this type of assessment is to provide feedback: For the teacher to target instruction and align activities with student readiness and interest For the student to identify areas of mastery as well as to see how to correct mistakes.

Formative assessment Should represent the bulk of our assessment activities Is both informal (unrecorded), and formal (recorded) Provides valuable information for the teacher for instructional planning Provides valuable information for the student and his parents to highlight needs for intervention and demonstrate progress

Summative assessment Used to demonstrate the degree of mastery a student has achieved at the end of a topic of focus Best represented by culminating projects which demonstrate the best effort of a student after multiple practice opportunities. Judged by criteria which have been provided from the beginning of the topic of focus Traditionally the components which make up the official grade for students

Interpreting Standardized test scores Following are three schemes that provide relative interpretations of standardized test scores. There are different ways to compare an individual student’s score in relation to the scores of other students.

Percentile ranks A percentile compares a student’s score with those of other students in a norm group. A percentile indicates the percent of students in the norm group that the student outperformed. For example, a percentile score of 60 means that the student performed better than 60% of the norm group. The norm group is not always national—it may also be local, and the percentile may well be different in this case.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Percentile Readily interpretable Dependent upon the quality of norm group

Grade equivalent A grade-equivalent score is an indicator of student test performance based on grade level and months of the school year. The purpose of grade equivalents is to transform scores on standardized tests into an index that reflects a student’s grade-level progress in school. A grade-equivalent score is a developmental score in the sense that it represents a continuous range of grade levels. Grade-equivalent scores are most appropriate for basic skills areas such as mathematics and reading.

Grade equivalent con’t While these scores seem easy to interpret, they may also be frequently misunderstood. This is because of the assumptions made in the process of equating raw scores with grade level progress. There can be substantial sampling and estimation errors in this process, so this score should be considered with several grains of salt.

A high grade-equivalent score does NOT mean that the student is capable of doing work at that grade level, but instead that the student may understand the tested material about as much as an average student at that grade level. “If a fourth-grade student gets a grade equivalent of 7.5 in mathematics, it is NOT accurate to say that the forth-grader is doing well in seventh-grade mathematics. It is more appropriate to say that a grade-equivalent score of 7.5 is an estimate of how an average seventh-grader might have performed on the fourth-grader’s mathematics test.”

Advantages and Disadvantages of Grade Equivalents Readily communicable Often misinterpreted

Scale scores Scale scores are converted raw scores that use a new, arbitrarily chosen scale to represent levels of achievement or ability. One cause for misinterpretation is the assumption by teachers and parents that all scale scores are similar, regardless of the test. However, these scores vary by test and by grade or age level as well sometimes.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Scale scores Not easily interpretable Useful in equalizing difficulties of different test forms

What do classroom teachers really need to know about standardized testing? You are the professional. You need to have at least passing knowledge of how to interpret these scores. You will need to be able to use these interpretations to help determine how to meet the students’ needs educationally You will need to be able to use these interpretations to help parents make sense of their child’s scores.