An interpretation of assessment methods in middle school science

Current calls for reform in science education include changes in assessment practices of teachers. However, little attention is given to how these changes are to take place and why teachers feel their current assessment practices are valid. This study was concerned with the extent to which teachers could incorporate alternative assessment practices into their middle school science curriculum. This interpretive study of the use of alternative methods to assess student learning investigated factors which influenced the validity of assessment tasks and those that determined how a teacher assessed student learning. Validity was interpreted from a constructivist perspective.

Three assertions emerged from the study: (1) cognitive referents influence a teacher's actions regarding assessment; (2) current assessment practices of teachers do not provide valid measures of what students know. Tasks and systems of aggregating scores often reward completion of tasks and motivation to learn rather than what is known; (3) a major threat to the validity of an assessment is the extent to which students can construct the meanings of tasks intended by the examiner and the extent to which the examiner can construct the meaning of responses of students.