Educational Assessment

Educational assessment

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Why educational assessment is limited in today’s programs In recent years, educational assessment has received a lot of attention from administrators, teachers, students, and parents in how schools remain accountable for student achievement. Since George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on January 8, 2002, standardized testing has become the focus of much debate. Even before NCLB, high-stakes testing (HST) has been highly criticized for its shortcomings in measuring student achievement while having such an impact on the decision-making processes that schools face (i.e., funding, teacher promotions, etc.). With so much focus on standardized testing, it is of little surprise that degree programs often neglect educational assessment as a complement to educational testing. That is, instead of using HST as a single measurement tool for making key educational decisions, schools incorporate a mixture of assessment tools (i.e., formative, summative, and diagnostic assessments) in determining the best option to take in the future in pursuit of improving student achievement. Before addressing various language programs, some definitions related to testing and assessment might be helpful. In the classroom, assessment can be divided between summative and formative assessment. Fisher and Frey (2007) define formative assessment as a way of improving instruction and providing student feedback whereby students self-monitor their own understandings of concepts throughout a unit in order for teachers to check their level of understanding. In contrast, they define summative assessment as a measure of student competency whereby students gauge their own progress toward course or grade-level goals and benchmarks at the end of a unit or course in order for teachers to grade, promote, and rank students. Put differently, HST and standardized tests implemented per NCLB – by themselves –

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are summative assessments that rank students and have little-to-nothing to do with the validity of instruction or the level of student understanding. Language learning programs today often disregard the importance of educational assessment when preparing pre-service and in-service language educators. Considering five different universities in the United States, one can see that educational assessment is typically limited to one method course at the undergraduate level and one assessment course at the graduate level (see table 1).

Table 1 Degree Courses

Cal State LA MA TESOL Language Testing Course

University of Utah BA TESOL Methodology Course

Carroll College

Goshen College

BA TESOL Methodology Course

BA TESOL Methodology Course

Note. Information was taken from each respective university website, 2009.

Anaheim University MA TESOL Language Testing Course

Albeit scarce, these assessment courses do focus on formative assessment as a means for improved student achievement. However, the question becomes whether these programs are allowing enough time for pre-service and in-service language educators to learn not only alternative assessments but why they are assessing in the first place. Teachers assess students for a variety of reasons. Popham (2008) distinguishes between “yesteryear’s” answers to “today’s” answers as follows: 

“Yesteryear’s answers as to why teachers assess students o Diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses o Monitoring students’ progress o Assigning grades o Determining one’s own instructional effectiveness

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Today’s answers as to why teachers assess students o Influencing public perceptions of educational effectiveness o Helping evaluate teachers o Clarifying teachers’ instructional intentions” (pp. 8-15)

Certainly adding today’s reasons for assessing to those from the past has reflected a level of accountability that did not exist before. Thus, formative and summative assessment supplies information to external stakeholders (i.e., parents, community, etc.), administrators, and teachers and students in order to make more informed decisions that best result in improving student achievement. Since TESOL (i.e., teaching English to students of other languages) programs are not allowing for much time in their curriculum dedicated to assessment, many of the reasons teachers assess students are being overlooked. For example, professional development and building common assessments are directly related to classroom assessment being implemented throughout the school. Instead of each teacher assessing and instructing in isolation, assessment results are shared throughout the faculty as a form of community of practice. Another reason why language programs limit their exposure to assessment is likely due to a more traditional rationale of testing. That is, assessment is planned after instruction as opposed to before it. Instead of assessment and instruction being two separate processes, formative assessment merges the two in a more dynamic and personalized way. Assessment is planned before instruction so that expected performance goals are established allowing learners to have a direction as information and feedback are negotiated between the language learner and educator. The impact that ongoing assessment has on instruction is usually not part of graduate assessment or undergraduate method courses in a significant way.

Educational assessment Standardized testing, high-stakes testing, and traditional rationales for educational assessment has negatively impacted TESOL training programs that today are limited to a single graduate course or undergraduate methods course which fail to provide the pre-service or inservice language educator the means for learning how to best align assessment with curriculum and instruction. Instead, language educators who use standardized testing as one of many assessment tools used to measure student achievement will be better equipped to not only rank language learners with their classmates but also to measure their level of understanding, knowledge, skills, and disposition in a more profound way. Planning assessment before instruction implies an assessment for learning as opposed to an assessment of learning. The ongoing information and feedback that teachers provide language learners is a constant negotiation that takes into account the classroom – and all of its diversity – as a learning community.

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References Anaheim University. (2009). Retrieved March 16, 2009 from http://www.anaheim.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=516&Itemid=1 87 Cal State LA. (2009). Retrieved March 16, 2009 from http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/aa/dcc/indexgrad.htm Carroll College. (2009). Retrieved March 16, 2009 from http://www.carroll.edu/academics/education/tesol.cc Fisher, D. and Frey, N. (2007). Checking for understandings: Formative assessment techniques for your classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Goshen College. (2009). Retrieved March 16, 2009 from http://www.goshen.edu/english/tesol Kubiszyn, T. and Borich, G. (2007). Educational testing and measurement: Classroom application and practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Jossey-Bass Education. Popham, W. (2008). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know. New York: Pearson. The University of Utah: Department of linguistics. (2009). Retrieved on March 16, 2009 from http://www.hum.utah.edu/index.php?pageId=911