Annotated Bibliography for Assessment and Standard

Greer, L. (2001). Does changing the method of assessment of a module improve the performance of a student? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 141 (2)

This article performs two tasks in that first summarizes past research on the rationale behind assessments in order to create a context, for its second task: the presentation of a study showing that tests which provided feedback lead to higher student performance than tests which did not. Past research has shown that the assessment process can be utilized to serve multiple purposes, including “reporting on student’s achievements, providing feedback to enable students to improve their understanding, diagnosing misunderstanding, expressing clearly the goals of the curriculum, improving the teacher’s methods. This study looks at the second and third of these reasons, as it tries to assess ways in which assessments provide feedback to the students in order to improve their understanding. The study found that students who receive feedback that directly to the mistakes and then were retested on that material did better on the tests than the group, which did not undergo this formative examination.

I think this study proves the point that assessments are more than a fire-and-forget test that students should focus on passing. Tests are a valuable learning experience, and provide both the teacher and the student with clear indications of what the student does not know. However, the test must be structured in a systematic way to ensure that the mistakes are evident to both the grader and the student. If a student fails a multiple choice test, the teacher doesn’t know why the student missed the information, the teacher just knows that the student did not know the right answer. Without knowing the exact mistake, the teacher cannot hope to improve that student’s understanding of the material. This is why tests that force the student to show the work for math and science, or essays for social studies, are a much better way to assess if the student understands the material. However, this does raise the problem of time on the teacher’s part, and determining where 100 students made mistakes will require much more time and effort than simply marking a multiple choice bubble wrong. I guess that’s why they pay us the big bucks though.

Howard, W., Crenshaw, M., No child left behind: a successful implementation. Education, 126 (3), 403-408

This controlled group experiment tests whether a school who implements the policies recommended by No Child Left Behind actually result in an improvement in student performance. This South Carolina study tests whether the NCLB-based model: Turning Good Teachers into Great Teachers: Turning Green Apples into Red Apples can lift a school out of the unsatisfactory rating. The study examines two very similar schools, one who implements the program and one that does not. This model implemented a number of changes including training the principal in effective leadership skills, training teachers to align their curriculum to South Carolina standards, bringing in the community, extending hours to weekends and after school, and introducing new technologies. Following this model, the “experimental school” improved to an average rating, while the control school remained unsatisfactory.

Although this study seems to prove that the model does work to improve schools, it is not specific enough to know which changes lead to the improvements. Since so many variable were changed between the control and the experimental it is hard to determine which is the causal agent. Perhaps the improvement is simply a result of extending the hours, and aligning the curriculum to standards did not change anything. Aligning the curriculum to the standards could have actually decreased the student performance, but all the other changes improved student performance so much that it outweighed the loss. In order to make this study more relevant and replicable it is important to narrow the change variables to just one, or else we cannot make any workable conclusions. However, I also believe that in terms of education reform, there is no one silver bullet to improving test results. In order to turn around schools, a lot needs to be changed, just like this study showed.