On learning and assessment

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is one of the two nationwide assessment consortia funded to develop assessments consistent with the Common Core State Standards. See Schoenfeld, Burkhardt, Abedi, Hess, and Thurlow (2012, 2015).

2. The intellectual issues pertain to the challenges of maintaining statistical validity when multiple scores representing multiple constructs are reported. These issues are addressed in the concluding discussion.

3. There is also the issue of what you consider the costs of testing. If students and teacher spend a month drilling for a skills-based multiple choice test (or computer-based equivalent) that costs a few pennies to score, then the true cost of the test includes a month of wasted teacher time. If, in contrast, sample assessments contain worthwhile tasks, then ‘test prep’ is actually time well spent.

4. The misconceptions are identified both from literature searches and extensive pilot testing of the materials.

5. This is a high-stakes issue. For example, Mitchell (2017, p. 53) reports the following: ‘In July 2016, the Vermont State Board of Education wrote a letter to former US Secretary of Education John B. King challenging proposed rules for the recently reauthorized Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (U. S. Department of education, 2015) for their weak empirical basis: “The proposed federal rules propose combining measures into a single score. The result is an invalid measure with false precision claiming to be transparent”’.