Challenges teachers face as they work to connect assessment and instruction

Abstract

Elementary teachers engaged in weekly conversations about their students' writing. Conversations were guided by a protocol that began with an assessment of students' writing samples and then moved to the generation of instructional ideas. The conversations were analyzed for what the teachers talked about and the extent to which they generated assessment-derived instructional recommendations. Results indicated that 99% of their time was spent on education-related conversation. Teachers spent 35.5% of their time on assessment and 10.5% on assessment- derived instruction. Two other topics occupied their attention: attempts to clarify the district's newly adopted assessment framework and unresolved policy issues. It was suggested that the teacher's lack of familiarity with the assessment framework and frustration with inconsistent policies account, in part, for the limited discussion of instructional ideas linked to assessment. Other evidence in the conversations, however, suggests that the everyday task of engaging a classroom of children had a greater influence over instructional decision-making than individual student needs.

Notes

Corresponding author: Saint Joseph College, 1678 Asylum Avenue, West Hartford, CT 06117, USA. Email: [email protected]