Writing Differences in Teacher Performance Assessments: An Investigation of African American Language and Edited American English

Szpara, Michelle Y.; Wylie, E. Caroline

doi:10.1093/applin/amm003

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(22 reference statements)

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“…For example, the Scoop Notebook is an instructional collection protocol that has been used to improve professional practice (Borko et al, 2007;Borko, Stecher, Alonzo, Moncure, & McClam, 2005). The portfolio protocol for NBPTS certification is used as part of a voluntary high-stakes assessment for advanced certification status (e.g., Cantrell, Fullerton, Kane, & Staiger, 2008;National Research Council, 2008;Szpara & Wylie, 2007). Related protocols have been used as part of licensure (e.g., California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2008; Connecticut State Department of Education, Bureau of Program and Teacher Evaluation, 2001), and three artifact protocols documented in the research literature have been used for the improvement of practice, judgments about school quality, and the evaluation of school reform models (Junker et al, 2006;Koh & Luke, 2009;Matsumura & Pascal, 2003;Mitchell et al, 2005;Newmann et al, 2001).…”

Section: Instructional Collections and Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating teaching and teachers.

Gitomer¹,

Bell²

2013

APA Handbook of Testing and Assessment in Psychology, Vol. 3: Testing and Assessment in School Psychology and Education.

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Almost everything related to the assessment and evaluation of teaching in the United States is undergoing restructuring. Purposes and uses, data sources, analytic methods, assessment contexts, and policy are all being developed, refined, and reconsidered within a cauldron of research, development, and policy activity. For example, the District of Columbia made headlines when it announced the firing of 241 teachers based, in part, on poor performance results from their new evaluation system, IMPACT (Turque, 2010). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, a $45 million study designed to test the ways in which a range of measures including scores on observation protocols, student engagement data, and value-added test scores might be combined into a single teaching evaluation metric (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2011a). The Foundation is also spending $290 million in four communities in intensive partnerships to reform how teachers are recruited, developed, rewarded, and retained (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2011b). In addition to pressure from districts and private funders, unions have also pressed for revised standards of teacher evaluation (e.g., American Federation of Teachers [AFT], 2010). Perhaps the most consequential contemporary effort is the federally funded Race to the Top Fund that encourages states to implement teacher evaluation systems based on multiple measures with a significant component based on students' academic growth to achieve funding (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). These and other recent research and policy developments are changing the way the assessment of teaching is understood. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview and structure to facilitate readers' understanding of the emerging landscape and attendant assessment issues.As well described in a number of recent reports, current evaluation processes suffer from a number of problems (Toch & Rothman, 2008;Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). For example, the New Teachers Project surveyed evaluation practices in several districts large and small and found that teachers were almost all rated highly. In systems that used binary ratings (i.e., satisfactory or unsatisfactory), almost 99% of teachers were rated satisfactory. To complicate matters, the same administrators who gave all teachers high marks also recognized that staff members varied greatly in performance and that some were actually poor teachers. In addition to an inability to sort teachers, current processes generally do not give teachers useful information to improve their practice, and policymakers do not believe the credibility of the evaluation process (Weisberg et al., 2009).Measures of teaching should be seen from a validity perspective, and thus, it is critical to begin with the purpose and use of the assessment. As Messick (1989) argued, validity is not an inherentThe authors thank Andrew Croft, Laura Goe, Heather Hill, Daniel McCaffrey, and Joan Snowden for their careful review of...

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Section: Instructional Collections and Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating teaching and teachers.

Gitomer¹,

Bell²

2013

APA Handbook of Testing and Assessment in Psychology, Vol. 3: Testing and Assessment in School Psychology and Education.

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“…I am further interested in how African American students use Ebonics across different writing assignments/genres and not only within one specific context. Much of the recent teacher-research on African American student-writers focuses on their ability to draw on Africanized patterns in expository writing performed in limited genres and writing situations, including essay exams (Gilyard and Richardson 2001;Fogel and Erhi 2006;Szpara and Wylie 2007), e-mail/digital textural genres (Canagarajah 1997;Kynard 2007), or creativewriting -based assignments (Ball 1996). In response to the need for additional teacher research on African American students, this article offers a case study of how one African American student-writer successfully produces expository writing in an Afrocentric first-year writing course at Michigan State University, a large land-grant midwestern research institution.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Africanized Patterns of Expression

Perryman-Clark¹

2012

Pedagogy

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Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American Language

Martin

Wright

2022

Applied Linguistics

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Research on bias in artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in recent years, especially around racial bias. Many modern technologies which impact people’s lives have been shown to have significant racial biases, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Emerging studies have found that widely-used ASR systems function much more poorly on the speech of Black people. Yet, this work is limited because it lacks a deeper consideration of the sociolinguistic literature on African American Language (AAL). In this paper, then, we seek to integrate AAL research into these endeavors to analyze ways in which ASRs might be biased against the linguistic features of AAL and how the use of biased ASRs could prove harmful to speakers of AAL. Specifically, we (1) provide an overview of the ways in which AAL has been discriminated against in the workforce and healthcare in the past, and (2) explore how introducing biased ASRs in these areas could perpetuate or even deepen linguistic discrimination. We conclude with a number of questions for reflection and future work, offering this document as a resource for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

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Writing Differences in Teacher Performance Assessments: An Investigation of African American Language and Edited American English

Cited by 4 publications

References 30 publications

Evaluating teaching and teachers.

Evaluating teaching and teachers.

Africanized Patterns of Expression

Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American Language

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