February 2000 | Volume 57 | Number 5

What Do We Mean by Results?

Not By Tests Alone

Marge Scherer

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Charting the Course of Student Growth

Dennie Palmer Wolf and Ann Marie White

To be truly effective, high-stakes tests must not only measure current student and school progress but also chart and report on student achievement over time. Test data are certainly helpful, but educators need to know more than how well or poorly a particular class scored at a fixed moment in time. To establish a better assessment system, we need to move from cross-sectional to longitudinal designs, sampling the domain to concentrating on valued performances, achievement levels to developmental scales, and league tables to growth curves. Undoubtedly, monitoring students in this intensive way is more time-consuming and difficult. But if we are genuinely interested in raising student achievement, our assessments must focus on how student achievement changes over time.

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Using Rubrics to Promote Thinking and Learning

Heidi Goodrich Andrade

Instructional rubrics are powerful tool for both assessing student work and supporting the development of sophisticated thinking skills. Most rubrics have two features in common: a list of "what counts" in a project or assignment, and gradations of quality for each criterion. The gradations help students understand what makes excellent, good, or poor work. The benefits of using instructional rubrics are many: they are easy to use and to explain; they make teachers' expectations clear; they provide helpful feedback to students; and they support students in developing skills (for example, writing skills) and deeper understanding.

While designing an instructional rubric can be a time-consuming task, bringing students into the process has many rewards. In thinking about the qualities of good and poor work, students learn a lot about the topic at hand. The classroom process involves studying models of rubrics, listing criteria, articulating levels of quality for each criterion, and creating a draft rubric. Teaching students how to use the rubric to self-assess enhances this process even further. Students are able to see their own work with new eyes, to identify what they have and haven't included in their writing. By blurring the distinction between instruction and assessment, rubrics can have a powerful effect on your students' learning.

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Looking at the Learning Record

Mary A. Barr

The author relates her experiences with the accountability frenzy that periodically overtakes education and describes her development, with colleagues, of the Learning Record (LR) Assessment System. The LR's primary purpose is to improve classroom teaching and learning so that all students can meet the high standards set by the world outside the classroom in ways that respect their own and their families' experiences and aspirations. Teachers, parents, and students all use the LR's developmental scales in reading, writing, and mathematics to assess student work throughout the year. Students can see where they have been and where they are headed because the Records confirm what they can do and show what they are learning to do. Teachers meet in groups for schoolwide assessments called moderations. At these sessions, pairs of teachers discuss each other's assessments to ensure that they are valid.

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Measuring Reading at Grade Level

Marcia Davidson and Oddmund Myhre

As a response to parents' concerns about the reading proficiency of their children and to a state mandate that all children should be reading at grade level by the end of 3rd grade, the Mukilteo School District in the state of Washington started a program called Victory 1000. The program's purpose is to provide ongoing assessment of a student's reading skills from 1st through 3rd grade. The assessment tool the district uses is timed oral reading fluency measures, which is a simple, reliable, and cost-effective method originally developed for special education students.

The oral reading fluency test has proven to be a reliable and valid assessment tool and a good predictor of a student's performance on high-stakes tests such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Teacher, parents, and administrators are so pleased with it that the district is planning to adapt it to mathematics.

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Make Mine an A

Shirley Hildebrand Benson

Frustrated by her students' lack of motivation, a veteran high school English teacher knew that it was time to step back. For one semester, while a mentor to new teachers, she observed two key elements in classrooms where students appeared to be highly motivated: formative evaluation and student self-management. She decided to reorganize her teaching methods to combine these elements in the hope of coaching her students to produce better work and empowering them to reach high academic and behavioral goals. She realized that an effective partnership should be a triad: parent, student, and teacher. The "partnership" had four phases: Phase 1 was for agreements, establishing minimum course requirements, and setting goals; phase 2 concentrated on student self-management; phase 3 refined feedback techniques and evaluation criteria; and phase 4 set up reporting procedures. The quality of the students' work grew, as did their motivation and enthusiasm. The parents were satisfied. And the teacher regained her love of teaching.

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Developing Data Mentors

Beverly W. Nichols and Kevin P. Singer

Faced with an increasing amount of assessment data, a Midwestern school district found two ways to increase the effectiveness of assessments, both high-stakes tests and classroom-based tests. For the first step, the district prepared standardized data notebooks for each building to organize all types of assessment data and the analyzed results. The second step involved training a small group of teachers and administrators in each building to be data mentors who could interpret assessment results and pass on the information to other faculty members and administrators.

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Results Count in Los Angeles

Ilene M. Berman, Christopher T. Cross and Joan Evans

Students in the Los Angeles Unified Public School District are raising their standardized test scores and increasing academic achievement. What accounts for their success? Schools are both implementing standards-based learning and sharing results and practices with one another. The schools follow five components of the standards:

Align curriculum to student learning standards;

Develop meaningful and fair assessments to measure achievement of the standards;

Promote professional development opportunities to support using standards and assessment to improve instruction;

Establish community partnerships to support achievement of the standards; and

Implement systemwide processes for the continual evaluation and improvement of student achievement.

In this way, communication and collaboration are crucial to the district's systemic approach to standards-based instruction.

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Portrait of a Benchmark School

Gordon Cawelti

The students of Carl C. Waitz School in southern Texas have defied predictions and expectations based on their poverty level and status as children of migrant farm workers by scoring highly on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Six factors account for this success: a highly committed faculty, a strong principal, extensive reading practice, extensive time on task, incentives and recognition, and a preassessment program. The author states that this last factor is central because students are taught what will be tested in conditions similar to the real test. Teachers can then use the information from these practice tests to adjust their teaching and focus on the specific learning needs of individual students.

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SMART Goals, SMART Schools

Jan O'Neill

In the Verona, Wisconsin, school district, educators are setting SMART goals: goals that are specific and strategic, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and timebound. These goals help teachers learn whether and how they make a difference in student learning. In addition, parents and the community gain confidence in their schools because they can see the measurable results. Teachers focus on setting results goals, which are measured by a test score, a rubric system, or another quantifiable tool or method. By the end of the school year, teachers examine the goals that they set in the fall and see the improvements. The Verona school district example shows that data-driven goals result in better communication among the community and improved learning for students.

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Creating Data-Driven Schools

Penny Noyce, David Perda and Robert Traver

How can school districts and teachers use student data to help make decisions about school policy, curriculum, and instruction? In Massachusetts, many school districts have become data-driven, with decisionmakers on all levels paying attention to numerical patterns to understand and address issues. For example, the Sound Public School District examined and compared student test scores to determine the relationship between reading proficiency and subject knowledge. The Halogen School District examined data patterns to inform decisions about curriculum and instruction. In all cases, data-driven schools require motivated district leaders, technical and financial support, and teachers who provide most of the data and monitor student progress over time. By using data to measure success, schools can determine where they are and where they need to go to promote greater student achievement.

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Student Assessment in Eight Countries

Cynthia Y. Levinson

No two countries are exactly alike in their testing practices. However, many countries face similar challenges and concerns about how, why, where, and when to test students. This study compares the assessment practices of eight countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, Germany, and Israel. Although each country faces its own unique problems and cultural differences, educators from around the world frequently encounter similar concerns about such issues as the reasons for testing, the amount of class time used to prepare students for tests, and the increasing centralization of testing. Indeed, the United States is not alone in the controversy surrounding student testing, and countries across the globe may learn from one another to ensure best practices for assessing their students.

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The Results We Want

Mike Schmoker

Educators can learn a lot from schools that have successfully raised scores on standardized achievement tests. The author disputes the claims that disadvantaged students cannot succeed on these tests and that teaching–even effective teaching–cannot raise their performance. He explains why and when standardized tests have value: they measure student progress and high-level skills and give schools direction toward improving teaching and learning. Also included are suggestions for moving beyond standardized tests toward locally developed end-of-course and formative assessments that are performance based.

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Results, Results, Results?

Dale Wallace

In Alberta, Canada, educators, parents, and students are feeling the pressure to excel on high-stakes provincial achievement exams. Given the increased time, emphasis, and money associated with high test scores, educators are finding that teaching to the test is all too common. By emphasizing test results rather than student needs, the system threatens to dehumanize students. In addition, the tests do not assess high-level thinking skills, which students will need to succeed into the next century. Educators need to stand up to politicians and others who espouse the tests and demand an end to provincial and statewide testing.

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In Virginia: The Standards of Learning

John O'Neil

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Virginia's Standards Make All Students Stars

Yvonne Thayer

Virginia's new Standards of Learning (SOL) tests are part of the education reform sweeping across the state. The reform consists of four major elements: new, high academic standards; tests to measure student progress in the new standards; measures to ensure accountability for student achievement; and a performance report card. The Standards have had a major impact on Virginia schools after just one year. Many schools have realigned their curriculums, and teachers have refocused their instruction. Schools are also developing tutoring and small-group instruction programs. All these changes are ensuring that young people in Virginia not only will be able to compete in the international economy, but also will be informed and responsible citizens.

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Who's Afraid of Standards?

Ivy Main

A mother responds to how the new Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) alter her daughters' educations. Although some schools have had to cut creative but time-inefficient activities to cover the new Standards curriculum, the author claims that most parents support the Standards because the Standards force schools to sharpen their focus on performance. The author also responds to critics who claim that the fact-learning tested by the SOL tests does not reflect true understanding of a subject by asserting that to understand a subject, a student must know.

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The SOL: No Easy Answers

Raymond Pasi

Some people hate them, and some people love them, but the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests are really a mixed bag. In some ways, the tests do motivate teachers, students, and parents to focus on necessary skills and to work together to improve. In other ways, the SOL tests present a danger: Educators risk losing sight of the chief aim of teaching—to educate students as well as possible—in order to get high test scores. There are no easy answers, but before schools are rewarded or punished for their SOL test scores, we need to include all the factors that affect test scores.

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SOL Tests Create Unfair Pressure

Katie Ernst

A frustrated student expresses her concerns about the effects of SOL testing upon teaching methods and students' desire to learn. Is SOL testing fair to students? Does it really test what they have learned over the years or rather what they have memorized overnight?

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Building a Future on Ancient Roots

Joanna Choi Kalbus

In October 1999, ASCD's Executive Council traveled to Israel for its fall meeting, hosted by its newest affiliate, Israel ASCD. Council members met with the Ministry of Education and visited universities and K–12 schools. The most striking aspect of Israeli schools is their diversity, which reflects Israel's immigrant population. Israel faces the challenge of absorbing large numbers of immigrant children from more than 70 countries. Schools have developed innovative programs and special methods to help teach students from many cultural, religious, and language backgrounds.

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Pay for Performance

Barbara Gleason

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A Value-Added View of Pupil Performance

John H. Holloway

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Review / Books of the Century

Craig Kridel

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Web Wonders

Judy Walter

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Letters

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ASCD Photo Contest / Picture Perfect in Y2K

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