STUDENT ASSESSMENT: THE ELUSIVE SCORE

Schools assess learners for many reasons, including the important diagnostic task of identifying what learners know so that individual learning goals can be developed and implemented.

Other kinds of assessment measure students' progress against their own earlier work, against other students' work, or against a standard.

Assessment standards can be applied to many situations — sometimes productively and sometimes not. Test results are used to measure how well students are meeting achievement standards established by the district.

Some tests are used to decide who will earn course credit and to determine who will move on to the next grade or earn a diploma. And, as we well know, test scores are often used — by politicians, the public and educators

themselves — to compare schools and school districts.

As professionals and citizens concerned with education, we all need a better basic knowledge of the different types of tests and their proper uses. This is important because even though most tests are neither good nor bad in themselves, misuse of tests can cause great harm.

First, there are two basic kinds of achievement tests: norm-referenced tests, which show how well students perform compared to other students around the country, and criterion-referenced tests, which show how well students perform against a pre-established standard.

Norm-referenced tests are usually designed by testing companies, are used to test thousands of students each year, and include questions that range in difficulty.

Students are not expected to answer all the questions correctly. Test results are interpreted by looking at the relative scores of all those taking the test and typically reported in percentiles.

The persons with the best scores will be at the top of the chart, sometimes no matter how many questions were left unanswered.

The well-known ITBS, or Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a norm-referenced test.

Criterion-referenced tests are usually shorter tests designed to find out specific information such as whether students understand a process, possess a certain skill, or have mastered a particular body of knowledge.

These tests do not typically judge one student against another; instead, scores are measured against performance criteria designed to measure identified concepts and skills.

The GHSGT, or Georgia High School Graduation Tests, are criterion-referenced tests.

Standardized tests are criticized on a number of grounds. The most serious complaint is that multiple choice and short-answer questions ask for simple factual recall and do not adequately reveal a student's abilities in critical analysis, conceptual understanding, or the ability to apply newly learned principles to an unfamiliar situation.

These are higher-order thinking skills, an extremely important part of what students should be taught, but they typically are not measured well by standardized tests, whether norm-referenced or criterion-referenced.

In addition, standardized tests do not reflect responsiveness to specifics of local curriculum. The biggest misuse of standardized tests, however, is their tendency to be used to compare schools and school systems.

Due to the growing concern regarding the shortcomings of standardized tests, many educators encourage a movement toward a more “authentic” assessment tool which will gauge students' performance on real-world challenges.

This type of performance-based testing can take various forms such as projects based on performance tasks and portfolios of their work over time. These types of assessment could provide a more accurate picture of students' mastery of what is actually being taught, providing credible evidence of what students know and are able to do.

It is, however, much easier said than done. There are, in fact, pros and cons to all forms of assessment.

As professional educators, we understand there is no single best approach to student assessment. The best approach is to include a variety of types of assessment at different times and with different groups of learners to serve different purposes.

We also realize that, whatever our plan of assessment, two realities will occur: first, any assessment will likely be criticized; second, the public will demand benchmarks to indicate how well we are doing.

Whether right or wrong, for better or worse, schools are judged by test results. Knowing these realities, we continually assess our assessment, and we keep our eyes on the educational horizon, ready to change if necessary to do our best for our students.

In this way, we can continue to make Coweta County a place where good schools are a great investment.

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