A real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes but of seeing through new eyes.-Marcel Proust I F WE ARE finally to connect assessment to school improvement in meaningful ways, we must come to see assessment through new eyes. Our failure to find a potent connection has resulted in a deep and intensifying crisis in assessment in American education. Few elected officials are aware of this crisis, and almost no school officials know how to address it. Our current assessment systems are harming huge numbers of students for reasons that few understand. And that harm arises directly from our failure to balance our use of standardized tests and classroom assessments in the service of school improvement. When it comes to assessment, we have been trying to find answers to the wrong questions.
What should training for teachers look like? Do our assessment practices align well with what we would like our students to do? How can you self‐assess assessment training at your institution?
Research on classroom assessment has tended to focus on standardized tests and has paid minimal attention to teacher‐developed assessments. As a result, we have a narrow understanding of the classroom assessment environment. This study was designed to broaden that understanding by exploring the nature and quality of teacher‐developed assessment. Teachers from a range of grades, subjects, and school districts described their patterns of test use, concerns about assessment, and use of performance assessment by completing an extensive questionnaire. When responses are summarized across teachers, the results suggest that the foundation and structure of classroom assessment consists primarily of teacher‐developed assessments, with performance assessment serving as one of the key assessment tools. Teachers are concerned about assessment and know that improvement may be needed, but they will need help to bring about necessary changes. Action plans are suggested for enhancing the quality of teacher‐developed tests.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.