CURRENT ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

The Ethical and Social Implications of Current Assessment Practices

The Ethical and Social Implications of Current Assessment Practices

Introduction

Ethical and social implications are often complicated and multifaceted and can be challenging for teachers as well as for students if they attempt to create simple solutions when dealing with assessment practices. (Fuchs, Fuchs and Compton, 2004) Many ethical issues are gray, not black and white, and it is common for biases and personal values, beliefs, and morality to enter the assessment process. As a result, ethical and social codes are designed to provide guidelines and general standards for students and teachers to deal with a variety of ethical issues and situations.

Monitoring student progress is an important form of classroom assessment. Teachers use progress monitoring for two purposes. The first purpose is to determine whether a student's academic development within an academic year is proceeding well. Second, when a student is not progressing adequately, teachers use progress monitoring to design an individualized instructional program that promotes better academic growth. The form of progress monitoring with the strongest scientific evidentiary base is curriculum-based measurement. A large body of research shows that curriculum-based measurement produces accurate descriptions of student development in reading and math. Moreover, formal school-based experiments (where teachers are randomly assigned to plan instruction with and without curriculum-based measurement) demonstrate that when teachers use curriculum-based measurement to inform their instructional decision making, their students achieve better. Curriculum-based measurement is therefore relevant to discussions about education in the 21st century, when the focus on improving student outcomes dominates education reform.

Mastery Measurement: The Conventional Approach to Progress Monitoring

Thirty years ago, the dominant approach to progress monitoring was mastery measurement. With mastery measurement, the teacher specifies a hierarchy of instructional objectives that constitute the annual curriculum. For each objective in the sequence, the teacher devises a test. The goal is to use this test to assess student mastery of the skill. When a student achieves mastery, the teacher simultaneously shifts instruction and assessment to the next skill in the hierarchy. In this way, learning is conceptualized as a series of short-term accomplishments that are believed to accumulate into broader competence. This form of progress monitoring is reflected in most basal reading and math programs. Also, years ago, it was popularized with the Wisconsin Instructional Design System (see http://www.wids.org) and Precision Teaching (e.g., http://www.celeration.org).

At about that same time, Stanley Deno at the University of Minnesota launched a systematic program of research on the technical features, logistical challenges, and instructional effectiveness of progress monitoring. The initial focus of that research program was mastery measurement, but several technical difficulties associated with mastery measurement quickly emerged. For example, to assess mastery of a specific skill, each item on a mastery measurement test addresses the same skill. Unfortunately, such testing is potentially misleading because many low achievers can, for example, read consonant-vowel-consonant words (like cat, dog, fun) if they know that all the words on the test conform to that same phonics ...