The Current State of Assessment Education

Abstract

In response to the existing accountability movement in the United States, a plethora of educational policies and standards have emerged at various levels to promote teacher assessment competency, with a focus on preservice assessment education. However, despite these policies and standards, research has shown that beginning teachers continue to maintain low competency levels in assessment. Limited assessment education that is potentially misaligned to assessment standards and classroom practices has been identified as one factor contributing to a lack of assessment competency. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to analyze the alignment between teacher education accreditation policies, professional standards for teacher assessment practice, and preservice assessment course curriculum. Through a curriculum alignment methodology involving two policy documents, two professional standards documents, and syllabi from 10 Florida-based, Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education–certified teacher education programs, the results of this study serve to identify points of alignment and misalignment across policies, standards, and curricula. The study concludes with a discussion on the current state of assessment education with implications for enhancing teacher preparation in this area and future research on assessment education.

National testing data in Norwegian classrooms: a tool to improve pupil performance?

“…Teachers are struggling with data systems, time use and lack of knowledge about how to use data to improve instruction (Anderson et al, 2010;Goertz, Olah, & Riggin, 2010;Valli & Buese, 2007;Wayman et al, 2012). Overall, research has shown that teachers are insufficiently prepared to effectively integrate assessment results into their practice (DeLuca & Bellara, 2013;Wayman, & Jimerson, 2014). It is, however, striking that existing research has not sufficiently investigated how teachers use test data to help pupils to improve their learning results.…”

Learning the Words: Supervising Teachers and the Language of Impact in an Initial Teacher Education Programme

“…Research indicates that many experienced and able classroom practitioners serving as supervising teachers lack confidence themselves in deploying data in their teaching-both in terms of analysing and learning lessons from prior assessment data and using data to draw conclusions about students' learning progress (DeLuca & Bellara, 2013;Reeves, 2017). Hence, it is again understandable that it is hard to find any substantial discussion about PSTs engagement with standard 5.4 (Demonstrate the capacity to interpret student assessment data to evaluate student learning).…”

The Assessment Purpose Triangle: Balancing the Purposes of Educational Assessment

“…The value and importance of valid, reliable assessment data to inform decision-making and to plan monitoring is uncontested (William et al, 2004;DeLuca and Bellara, 2013;Epstein et al, 2015;Wise and Smith, 2016). Brown (2017), however, highlights the inconvenient truth that our assumption that assessment data are always trustworthy and subject to appropriate scrutiny is a fallacy.…”