Next Generation Assessment E-Book

Linda Darling-Hammond

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A forward-thinking look at performance assessment in the 21st century Next Generation Assessment: Moving Beyond the Bubble Test to Support 21st Century Learning provides needed answers to the nation's growing concerns about educational testing in America. Drawing on research and the experiences of leading states and countries, this new book examines how performance assessments can offer a feasible alternative to current high stakes tests. As parents, educators, and policymakers have increasingly criticized the effects of the teaching to the test mandate from the No Child Left Behind Act, the need for this resource has never been more critical. This summary volume to Beyond the Bubble Test speaks to the nationwide unease about current tests' focus on low-level skills, like recalling and restating facts, rather than higher-order skills such as problem-solving, analyzing, and synthesizing information. It illustrates how schools can use authentic assessments to improve teaching and learning as they involve students in conducting research, designing investigations, developing products and solutions, using technology, and communicating their ideas in many forms. This important book: * Serves as a must-have resource for those interested in the most current research about how to create valid and reliable performance assessments * Explains how educators can improve practice by developing, using, and scoring performance assessments * Helps policymakers and educators accurately assess the benefits and possibilities of adopting performance assessments nationally If you're an educator, researcher, graduate student, district administrator, or education policy specialist, Next Generation Assessment is an indispensable resource you'll turn to again and again.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

The Authors

Chapter 1: Beyond the Bubble Test

The Influence of Testing on Learning

Emerging Opportunities for Better Assessment

Notes

Chapter 2: Defining Performance Assessment

What It Means to Test Higher-Order Skills

A Continuum of Assessment Options

Notes

Chapter 3: Experiences with Performance Assessment in the United States and Abroad

State Performance Assessments in the United States

Performance Assessments Abroad

Notes

Chapter 4: How Performance Assessment Can Support Student and Teacher Learning

How Assessments Can Structure Student Learning Opportunities

How Assessments Can Organize Teacher Learning

How Assessments Can Illuminate Student Thinking

How Assessments Can Support Teaching of Deeper Learning Skills

How Assessments Can Create School Coherence and a Culture of Inquiry

Summary

Notes

Chapter 5: Meeting the Challenges of Performance Assessments

Achieving Reliability and Validity

Ensuring Fairness

Supporting Feasibility

Notes

Chapter 6: Making High-Quality Assessment Affordable

How High-Quality Assessments Can Be Made Affordable

A Cost-Benefit Perspective

Notes

Chapter 7: Building Systems of Assessment

What Do Systems of Assessment Consist of?

How Can Assessment Be Made Useful for Students?

How Might States Develop Systems of Assessment?

How Should Accountability Systems Evolve?

Notes

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 How the Demand for Skills Has Changed: Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Nonroutine Task Input

Figure 1.2 Competencies to Be Developed and Assessed

Figure 2.1 Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain

Figure 2.2 Assessment Continuum

Figure 6.1 Average per Pupil Costs for State and Local ELA and Math Tests

Figure 6.2 Diminishing Expenditures per Capita for High-Quality Assessments

Figure 7.1 Relative Emphasis on Assessment Purposes

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Example of Tasks: GCSE English

Table 6.1 Scoring Time and Cost Estimates for Performance Assessments

Table 6.2 High-Quality Summative Assessment Design

Table 6.3 Assessment Costs under Different Teacher Scoring Assumptions

Table 7.1 Queensland’s System of Assessments

Exhibit 1.1 Mathematics Performance Tasks

Exhibit 1.2 English Language Arts Performance Tasks

Exhibit 2.1 Collegiate Learning Assessment Sample Performance Task

Exhibit 2.2 Ohio Performance Assessment Project: English Language Arts Performance Task

Exhibit 2.3 Ohio Performance Assessment Project: Heating Degrees Task

Exhibit 2.4 Disaster in the Gulf Project

Exhibit 3.1 Connecticut Ninth/Tenth Grade Science Assessment: Acid Rain Task

Exhibit 3.2 Example from a Victoria, Australia, High School Biology Exam

Exhibit 3.3 Project Work in Singapore

Exhibit 5.1 Progress Map for Counting and Ordering

Exhibit 5.2 New Jersey Department of Education, 2002–2003 SRA Mathematics Performance Assessment Task

Exhibit 7.1 Queensland Science Assessments at Grades 7 and Senior Level

Exhibit 7.2 Designing a System of Assessments in New Hampshire

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Praise for Next Generation Assessment

“Measuring (and, therefore, teaching) what really matters in twenty-first century schoolsdemands that we capture students’ readiness to apply knowledge to complex, multi-faceted,non-routine, real-world tasks. Such assessments push the boundaries of our technicalexpertise; they also confront deep-seated cultural norms and contentious politics. Here,leading scholars offer both state-of-the-art expertise and practical insights, providingmuch-needed guidance to those developing, advocating for, adopting, implementing, andlearning from measures that really matter.”

—Jeannie Oakes, Director, Educational Opportunity and Scholarship, Ford Foundation

“Next Generation Assessment promotes a forward-thinking, proactive approach to evaluatingstudent learning in ways that respect students as individual learners and respect educatorsas the professionals they are. Darling-Hammond and colleagues masterfully describehow performance assessments can become a meaningful part of the crucial teaching andlearning process, rather than replacing it. As educators fight to get rid of low-quality teststhat help our kids learn to fill in bubbles, this book provides a promising alternative thatinvolves educators in the development and scoring of performance assessments in ways thatare beneficial to them and to their students. Educators have been clamoring for commonsensesolutions and this work delivers!”

—Dennis Van Roekel, President, National Education Association

“Next Generation Assessment helps readers think strategically about accountabilityand assessment in America’s public schools and understand how performance-basedapproaches—instead of rote memorization—can allow schools to support both deeperlearning and higher standards. This is the way students can develop the skills and knowledgethey need for life, citizenship, college, and career. In this important volume, LindaDarling-Hammond and colleagues show how much is known about a better path forwardon testing and accountability, if only we are willing to take it.”

—Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

“This book sheds new light on how educational testing policies are improving or hinderingthe measurement of students’ abilities to think and learn in ways that will assure theirsuccess. Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues build a case for educational policy anddecision makers to provide the time and resources needed to shift to balanced performanceassessment, moving way beyond test scores, toward more authentic teaching and learning.”

—Gail Connelly, Executive Director, National Association ofElementary School Principals

“This work comes at a critical time as education leaders in all fifty states grapple with howto move to a system of performance assessments that reflects the more rigorous deeperlearning outcomes they are seeking. Pointing to current policies and practice, this bookis an excellent guide directing practitioners and policymakers on how to transition to anassessment system that genuinely shapes, informs, and improves learning for all studentsand teachers.”

—Governor Bob Wise, President, Alliance for Excellent Education;author of Raising the Grade

Next Generation Assessment

Moving Beyond the Bubble Test to Support 21st Century Learning

Linda Darling-Hammond in collaboration with

Jamal Abedi • Frank Adamson • Jillian Chingos • David T. Conley • Beverly Falk • Ann Jaquith • Stuart Kahl • Suzanne Lane • William Montague • John Olson • Margaret Owens • Raymond Pecheone • Lawrence O. Picus • Ed Roeber • Brian Stecher • Thomas Toch • Barry Topol

Cover design by Wiley

Cover image: © Brian A. Jackson | Thinkstock

Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book assembles the key insights from a more comprehensive volume, published separately by Jossey-Bass—Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessment Supports 21st Century Teaching and Learning— that summarizes research and lessons learned regarding the development, implementation, and consequences of performance assessments. The project examines experiences with and lessons from large-scale performance assessment in the United States and abroad, including technical advances, feasibility issues, policy implications, uses with English Language Learners, and costs.

The work was funded by the Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Nellie Mae Educational Foundation, and Sandler Foundation and guided by an advisory board of education researchers, practitioners, and policy analysts, ably chaired by Richard Shavelson. The board shaped specifications for commissioned papers that became some of these chapters and reviewed these papers on their completion. We are grateful to these funders and to advisory board members Eva Baker, Christopher Cross, Nicholas Donahue, Michael Feuer, Edward Haertel, Jack Jennings, Peter McWalters, Lorrie Shepard, Guillermo Solano-Flores, Brenda Welburn, and Gene Wilhoit for their support and wisdom.

The contributors to this book thank all the educators and other innovators over many years who have devoted hundreds of thousands of hours to developing and implementing thoughtful curriculum and assessments that support students and teachers in their learning.

We also thank Sonya Keller for her helpful and thorough editorial assistance and Samantha Brown for her help securing permissions for the entries in this book. Early versions of these papers were ably ushered into production by Barbara McKenna. Without their efforts, this project would not have come to fruition.

THE AUTHORS

Jamal Abedi, professor of education at the University of California, Davis, specializes in educational and psychological assessments. His research focus is testing for English language learners and issues concerning the technical characteristics and interpretations of these assessments. From 2010 to the present, Abedi has served as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. Before then, he served on the expert panel of the US Department of Education’s LEP Partnership and he was founder and chair of AERA’s Special Interest Group on Inclusion and Accommodation in Large-Scale Assessment. In 2008, the California Educational Research Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Abedi received his PhD from Vanderbilt University.

Frank Adamson, a policy and research analyst at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), currently focuses on the adoption of assessments of deeper learning and twenty-first-century skills at the state, national, and international levels. He also conducts research on educational equity and opportunities to learn and has published on teacher salary differences within labor markets in New York and California. Prior to joining SCOPE, Adamson worked at AIR and SRI International designing assessments, evaluating US education initiatives, and developing international indicators for the OECD and UNESCO. He received an MA in sociology and a PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University.

Jillian Chingos (previously Jillian Hamma) is currently a sixth-grade teacher at Alpha: Blanca Alvarado Middle School in San Jose, California. Chingos attended Dartmouth College, where she majored in English, minored in public policy, and received her teaching credential. She previously worked at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity, developing and researching performance assessments.

David T. Conley is professor of educational policy and leadership and founder and director of the Center for Educational Policy Research (CEPR) at the University of Oregon. He is also the founder, chief executive officer, and chief strategy officer of the Educational Policy Improvement Center and president of CCR Consulting Group, both in Eugene and Portland, Oregon. Through these organizations, he conducts research on a range of topics related to college readiness and other key policy issues with funding provided by grants and contracts from a range of national organizations, states, school districts, and school networks. His line of inquiry focuses on what it takes for students to succeed in postsecondary education. His latest publication, Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core, was recently published by Jossey-Bass (for more information, see www.collegecareerready.com).

Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun professor of education and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University. Darling-Hammond is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. Her research and policy work focus on issues of educational equity, teaching quality, school reform, and performance assessment. In 2008, she served as director of President Obama’s education policy transition team. Her book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future received the coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2012. Her most recent book is Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement (2013).

Beverly Falk is professor and director of the graduate programs in early childhood education at the School of Education, City College of New York. Her areas of expertise include early childhood education, early literacy, performance assessment, school change, teacher education, and teacher research. She has served in a variety of educational roles: classroom teacher; school founder and director; district administrator; and consultant, fellow, and leader in schools, districts, states, and national organizations. Currently she is editor of the New Educator and senior scholar at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity. Falk received her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Ann Jaquith is associate director at Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. She has worked on a variety of performance assessment projects undertaken to reform schools in New York, Ohio, and California. As a former teacher and administrator, her expertise is in building the instructional and leadership capacity needed to use performance assessments to improve instruction and student learning. Her research interests include studying how instructional capacity gets built at different levels of the system and examining the practices professional development providers use that change instruction and improve student learning. She received her PhD in curriculum and teacher education from Stanford University.

Stuart Kahl is founding principal and CEO of Measured Progress as Advanced Systems in Measurement and Evaluation. A former elementary and secondary teacher, he worked for the Education Commission of the States, the University of Colorado, and RMC Research Corporation. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Kahl also serves as a technical consultant to various education agencies. He has been recognized for his work in the areas of standard setting for non-multiple-choice instruments and the alignment of curriculum and assessment. Kahl received his PhD from the University of Colorado.

Suzanne Lane is professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her recent research focuses on the implications for the next generation of assessments based on the lessons from classroom instruction and achievement in the 1990s, the assessment of twenty-first-century thinking skills, and the interplay among a theory of action, validity, and consequences. Lane has been the president of the National Council on Measurement in Education (2003–2004) and vice president of Division D of the American Educational Research Association (2002–2003). She received a PhD in research methodology, measurement, and statistics from the University of Arizona.

William Montague is a student at the University of Virginia School of Law. He began his career as a high school English teacher in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, as a member of Teach For America. He went on to work for Independent Education, an association of independent schools in the Washington, DC, area. While there, he collaborated on a number of projects with the organization’s executive director, Thomas Toch, a longtime education writer and policy analyst. Montague received his BA from the University of Virginia, where he majored in economics and history.

John Olson is senior partner of Assessment Solutions Group (ASG), which he cofounded in 2008. He is also president of the consulting business he founded in 2006, Olson Educational Measurement and Assessment Services, which provides technical assistance and support to states, school districts, federal bodies, testing companies, researchers, and others. He has more than thirty years of experience managing and consulting on a variety of measurement and statistical issues for international, national, state, and local assessment programs through his work at Harcourt Assessment, the Council for Chief State School Officers, the American Institutes for Research, and the Education Statistics Services Institute. He served in a number of leadership roles for the National Assessment of Educational Progress at the Educational Testing Service. Olson holds a PhD in educational statistics and measurement from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Margaret Owens is currently a teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco. She earned her teaching credential and MA from Stanford University. Her studies focused on new pedagogical strategies, such as complex instruction, that bring more collaboration and engagement to students historically alienated in mathematics. Prior to her teaching career, she studied political science at Stanford with a focus on American education.

Raymond Pecheone is professor of practice at Stanford University and the founder and executive director of the Stanford Center for Assessment Learning, and Equity (SCALE). Under Pecheone, SCALE focuses on the development of performance assessments and performance-based systems for students, teachers, and administrators at the school, district, and state levels. Prior to launching SCALE, Pecheone was the bureau chief for curriculum, research, and assessment in the Connecticut State Department of Education; codirector of the first Assessment Development Lab for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; and project director to support the redesign of the New York State Regents. Most recently, Pecheone and SCALE are developing the performance assessment specifications and tasks for the Smarter Balanced national assessment system. He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in measurement and evaluation.

Lawrence O. Picus is vice dean for faculty affairs and professor at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California. He is an expert in the area of public financing of schools, equity and adequacy of school funding, school business administration, education policy, linking school resources to student performance, and resource allocation in schools. His current research interests focus on adequacy and equity in school finance, as well as efficiency and productivity in the provision of educational programs for PreK–12 children. Picus is past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, has served on the EdSource board of directors for twelve years, and has consulted extensively on school finance issues in more than twenty states. He earned a PhD in public policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School, an MA in social science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in economics from Reed College.

Ed Roeber is a consultant at Assessment Solutions Group (ASG). He has served as state assessment director in the Michigan Department of Education, director of student assessment programs for the Council for Chief State School Officers, vice president of Measured Progress, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University. For ASG and the other organizations, he advises states and other organizations on student assessment– related programs and functions. Currently he is a consultant on student assessment to several organizations (Michigan Assessment Consortium, Michigan State University, and Wisconsin Center for Educational Research/University of Wisconsin). He has written extensively about educational assessment, consulted with a number of agencies and organizations, and spoken frequently about student assessment. He has a PhD in educational measurement from the University of Michigan.

Brian Stecher is a senior social scientist and associate director of RAND Education and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses on measuring educational quality and evaluating education reforms, with an emphasis on assessment and accountability systems. During his more than twenty years at RAND, he has directed prominent national and state evaluations of No Child Left Behind, mathematics and science systemic reforms, and class size reduction. His measurement-related expertise includes test development, test validation, and the use of assessments for school improvement. Stecher has served on expert panels relating to standards, assessments, and accountability for the National Academies and is currently a member of the Board on Testing and Assessment. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Thomas Toch is senior managing partner for public policy engagement at the Carnegie Foundation. He also serves as director of the Carnegie Foundation’s Washington, DC, office. He is a founder and former codirector of the think tank Education Sector and a former guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He helped launch Education Week in the 1980s. He spent a decade as the senior education correspondent at US News and World Report and has contributed to the Atlantic, the New York Times, and other national publications. His work has twice been nominated for National Magazine Awards. He is the author of two books on American education, In the Name of Excellence (Oxford University Press) and High Schools on a Human Scale (Beacon Press).

Barry Topol is managing partner of Assessment Solutions Group (ASG). He leads ASG in providing assessment cost, management, and state accountability systems analysis and consulting to states, universities, and other nonprofit institutions. Since forming ASG in 2009, Topol and ASG have worked with a number of states and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to assist them in designing their assessment and accountability systems to be more effective and efficient. Topol designed ASG’s assessment cost model, the only model in the industry that can be used to determine the appropriate price for any assessment. Topol has a BA in economics from UCLA and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.

Chapter 1Beyond the Bubble TestHow Performance Assessment Can Support Deeper Learning

I am calling on our nation’s Governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.

President Barack Obama, March 2009

Reform of educational standards and assessments has been a constant theme in nations around the globe. As part of an effort to keep up with countries that appear to be galloping ever further ahead educationally, US governors and chief state school officers recently issued a set of Common Core State Standards that aim to outline internationally benchmarked concepts and skills needed for success in today’s and tomorrow’s world.1 The standards, which intend to create “fewer, higher, and deeper” curriculum goals, are meant to ensure that students are college and career ready.

Changes in teaching and testing are profoundly implicated by this goal. Genuine readiness for college and twenty-first-century careers, as well as participation in today’s democratic society, requires, as President Obama has noted, much more than “bubbling in” on a test. Students need to be able to find, evaluate, synthesize, and use knowledge in new contexts, frame and solve nonroutine problems, and produce research findings and solutions. It also requires students to acquire well-developed thinking, problem-solving, design, and communication skills.

These are the so-called twenty-first-century skills that reformers around the world have been urging schools to pursue for decades—skills that are increasingly in demand in a complex, technologically connected, and fast-changing world. As research by economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane shows, the routine skills used in factory jobs that once fueled an industrial economy have declined sharply in demand as they are computerized, outsourced, or made extinct by the changing nature of work. The skills in greatest demand now are the nonroutine interactive skills that are important for collaborative invention and problem solving. (See figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1 How the Demand for Skills Has Changed: Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Nonroutine Task Input

Source: Murnane, R., & Levy, F. (1996). Teaching the new basic skills: Principles for educating children to thrive in a changing economy. New York, NY: Free Press.

In part, this is because knowledge is expanding at a breathtaking pace. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley estimated that from 1999 to 2002, the amount of new information produced in the world exceeded the amount produced in the entire history of the world previously.2