In Example 1, the consequences of assessment are quite serious for individual students: If they fail to pass all subjects, they may not get a job because employers require a secondary school certificate; if they fail to do well on the examinations, they have no opportunity for attending a university. The stakes are high in Example 2, but not quite as high as in Example 1. Students can stay in school for several years, prepare for the tests, and retake the tests each year. In Example 3, there are high stakes for school administrators and teachers, but not for individual students. In fact, the tests may be low stakes for the students because there appear to be no consequences for their doing poorly on the tests.
Accountability Testing
Although the use of high-stakes testing in the United States can be traced back to Horace Mann in the 1850s, modern high-stakes testing in the United States grew out of school reform movements that developed during the 1980s. Educational reformers and state legislators wanted to ensure that virtually all students could meet educational standards set by the state and demanded by employers. Employers needed to increase productivity and to be competitive in world markets. They needed a better-educated workforce to handle the demands of rapidly increasing technology and greater intellectual skills needed in the workplace. State legislators considered testing to be one way of holding schools accountable for students learning the educational standards set by a state.
Assessment that is used to hold individual students or school officials responsible for ensuring that students meet state standards is called accountability testing. Usually accountability testing is accompanied by high-stakes consequences. A state’s accountability testing may take several forms, as is shown by the examples above. A state may require both individual and school accountability, too. Check your state’s education department website for its current regulations regarding individual and school accountability.
No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is important to our discussion of high-stakes assessment because it requires states to establish challenging content standards and performance standards (referred to as achievement standards in the NCLB
literature) and to demonstrate by way of tests and other assessments how well students have attained high levels of achievement on these standards. A state’s failure to provide this demonstration results in loss of federal education funds that are authorized under NCLB. Assessment under NCLB is a school-level accountability tool.
Standards-Based Proficiency Requirements
Content standards describe the subject-matter facts, concepts, principles, and so on that students are expected to learn. Performance standards describe the things students can perform or do once the content standards are learned. (We discuss state standards and how to align your learning objectives to them in Chapter 2 .) When students are assessed on a state’s standards, they are classified into one of three categories for purposes of reporting to the federal government:
basic, proficient, and advanced. A state may have more than three categories, but all must be
aligned to these three. Under NCLB, the goal originally was for 100% of the students in each school to reach the proficient level or higher on the state’s content and performance standards by 2014. In addition, schools were to show adequate
yearly progress (AYP)toward this goal or have sanctions imposed.
High-Stakes Sanctions NCLB sanctions and corrective actions for schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress after 2 years were quite restrictive and entirely punitive; there were no official rewards for schools that did well. In addition, reaching 100% proficiency was a statistically unattainable goal, and, as 2014 approached, more and more schools failed to meet AYP goals. Beginning in 2011, the federal government allowed states to apply for waivers from some of the NCLB requirements—such as meeting original AYP goals—and sanctions. In order to qualify for a waiver, states had to address four principles ( U.S. Department of Education, 2012 ).
Disaggregation An important provision of the NCLB Act is that a state must report test summaries at the school level and must disaggregate the data. Disaggregation of test results means that the test results for the total population of students
are separated in order to report on individual subgroups of students—such as students who are poor, who are members of minority groups, who have limited English proficiency, and who have disabilities—in addition to reporting on the total
student population. The reason for this requirement is that the federal government wants to ensure that states are accountable for all students learning the challenging state standards, including those in these subgroups. In some instances in the past, states reported only on the whole population of their students, thus masking the fact that some subgroups of students were not receiving quality education and were failing to meet the standards.
Assessment of Students With Disabilities Under NCLB, all students must be assessed, including students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency. Ninety-five percent of students with disabilities must participate in the assessment. Students’ disabilities may be used as a basis for accommodations to the assessment process when they are unable to participate under the standardized conditions set for the general student population. Further, alternative
assessment methods must be found to assess those students who cannot participate even with accommodations. States are now granted some limited flexibility in adjusting content and performance standards for students with severe cognitive impairments ( U.S. Department of Education, 2005 ).
ACQUIRING THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS TO ASSESS STUDENTS
The American Federation of Teachers, the National Council on Measurement in Education, and the National Education Association published Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students in 1990. These
standards are somewhat dated now. Most importantly, they do not address formative assessment skills like being able to help students generate and use assessment information for their own learning. Appendix A presents a more recent synthesis of the various knowledge and skills that, taken together, comprise what today would be called “assessment literacy” for teachers. The aim of this book is to develop these understandings and skills in its readers.
CONCLUSION
This chapter introduced you to basic assessment terms and concepts as well as basic types and purposes of educational decisions. It would not be exaggerating to say that appropriate assessment information should support everything teachers and administrators do in schools. The remainder of this book is devoted to developing the knowledge and skills you will need to accomplish that assessment well. In Chapter 2 , we turn to defining instructional goals, which are the foundation on which formative and summative assessment, as well as instruction, must be based.