Standards and Assessments

Introduction

The intent of this focus area is to highlight issues related to standards and assessment and provide insight into some of the challenges states, districts and schools face when developing and implementing new standards and assessment systems. In several recent newsletters of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, CRESST Line, directors Eva Baker and Robert Linn identify and provide insight into some of these challenges.

Challenges Identifying standards that communicate to all stakeholders

The many different efforts on the part of states, schools and districts to identify standards that communicate to educators, students, and parents what is expected of students has resulted in markedly different outcomes. Some content standards are fairly general and identify few essential competencies while others are quite specific and include a vast repertoire of the knowledge and skills students must learn. Some standards relate directly to classroom practice; whereas others are distant from teaching and learning activities. Audiences for standards also differ. Some are directed more toward the general public; others toward educators. Performance standards have also varied along these same dimensions, with some performance standards being quite vague, others highly specified. In addition the translation of content standards into performance standards presents a whole new set of challenges educators must face.

Aligning assessments with content and performance standards

Aligning assessments with content and performance standards is also a challenge for educators. The generality or specificity of content and performance standards lead to different problems with regard to assessments. Standards that are too general fail to provide enough guidance for assessment design, resulting in a wide variety of assessments that may fail to pin down what the standards really mean. At the other extreme, highly specified standards result in prescribed teaching approaches that leave little room for flexibility. In other words, how do we know that assessments represent reasonable interpretations of the content and performance standards? Baker and Linn suggest that "the real task is to design crosswalks: clearly marked ways to get from the standards side of the street to the assessment side.... Such crosswalks may involve thinking about and specifying the particular topics to be included in the content standards, the depth of knowledge expected at different stages, or the cognitive demands and skills in which the academic content gets embedded."

Using multiple measures to determine adequate yearly progress

Given the emphasis Title I has placed on assessing whether schools are making adequate yearly progress based on multiple measures that are aligned with state standards, schools and districts are struggling with how to put together results from these different measures. Questions raised from this Title I provision include how to identify a set of multiple measures, how to validate the combined effect of these measures and make sense of them as an integrated assessment system. A stumbling block for schools and districts is that no clear way of combining information from various measures in a way that allows schools and districts to make judgements about progress and achievement has been identified. Furthermore, multiple measures can be viewed from different perspectives (i.e., as a means of meeting the needs of various stakeholders who attach differing degrees of credibility to different measures, or as a transition from one form of assessment to another). These different perspectives can lead to different uses of multiple measures and confusion about them.

Designing and validating accommodations of assessments for children with special needs

A final challenge is the design and validation of accommodations of assessments for children with special needs or who are linguistically diverse. Understanding which accommodations work best with which children and at which stages in their development is critical to ensuring that schools, districts and states are held accountable for the learning of all students. Research into the effectiveness of accommodations to expand valid testing of special populations is needed. The issues discussed above are merely a few of those deserving attention in the area of standards and assessment. This focus area is intended to help you expand your knowledge of these and other issues and to navigate the many resources related to standards and assessment on the Internet. (Sources for this introduction include the following articles: Baker, E. & Linn, R., Revisiting Issues of Standards and Title I, CRESST Line, Spring 1997; Baker, E & Linn, R., Title I Assessment in a New Era, CRESST Line, Spring 1996.)