How can assessment of knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics be done? Explain your answer with examples.

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Part: Although assessments are currently used for many purposes in the educational system, a premise of this report is that their effectiveness and utility must ultimately be judged by the extent to which they promote student learning. The aim of assessment should be “to educate and improve student performance, not merely to audit it” .To this end, people should gain important and useful information from every assessment situation. In education, as in other professions, good decision making depends on access to relevant, accurate, and timely information. Furthermore, the information gained should be put to good use by informing decisions about curriculum and instruction and ultimately improving student learning (Falk, 2000; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1995).

Assessments do not function in isolation; an assessment’s effectiveness in improving learning depends on its relationships to curriculum and instruction. Ideally, instruction is faithful and effective in relation to curriculum, and assessment reflects curriculum in such a way that it reinforces the best practices in instruction. In actuality, however, the relationships among assessment, curriculum, and instruction are not always ideal. That synergy can best be achieved if the three parts of the system are bound by or grow out of a shared knowledge base about cognition and learning in the domain.

Purposes and Contexts of Use
Educational assessment occurs in two major contexts. The first is the classroom. Here assessment is used by teachers and students mainly to assist learning, but also to gauge students’ summative achievement over the longer term. Second is large-scale assessment, used by policy makers and educational leaders to evaluate programs and/or obtain information about whether individual students have met learning goals.

The sharp contrast that typically exists between classroom and large-scale assessment practices arises because assessment designers have not been able to fulfill the purposes of different assessment users with the same data and analyses. To guide instruction and monitor its effects, teachers need information that is intimately connected with the work their students are doing, and they interpret this evidence in light of everything else they know about their students and the conditions of instruction. Part of the power of classroom assessment resides in these connections. Yet precisely because they are individualized and highly contextualized, neither the rationale nor the results of typical classroom assessments are easily communicated beyond the classroom. Large-scale, standardized tests do communicate efficiently across time and place, but by so constraining the content and timeliness of the message that they often have little utility in the classroom. This contrast illustrates the more general point that one size of assessment does not fit all. The purpose of an assessment determines priorities, and the context of use imposes constraints on the design, thereby affecting the kinds of information a particular assessment can provide about student achievement.

Inevitability of Trade-Offs in Design
To say that an assessment is a good assessment or that a task is a good task is like saying that a medical test is a good test; each can provide useful information only under certain circumstances. An MRI of a knee, for example, has unquestioned value for diagnosing cartilage damage, but is not helpful for diagnosing the overall quality of a person’s health. It is natural for people to understand medical tests in this way, but not educational tests. The same argument applies nonetheless, but in ways that are less familiar and perhaps more subtle.

Multiple assessments are thus needed to provide the various types of information required at different levels of the educational system. This does not mean, however, that the assessments need to be disconnected or working at cross-purposes. If multiple assessments grow out of a shared knowledge base about cognition and learning in the domain, they can provide valuable multiple perspectives on student achievement while supporting a core set of learning goals. Stakeholders should not be unduly concerned if differing assessments yield different information about student achievement; in fact, in many circumstances this is exactly what should be expected. However, if multiple assessments are to support learning effectively and provide clear and meaningful results for various audiences, it is important that the purposes served by each assessment and the aspects of achievement sampled by any given assessment be made explicit to users.

Later in the chapter we address how multiple assessments, including those used across both classroom and large-scale contexts, could work together to form more complete assessment systems. First, however, we discuss classroom and large-scale assessments in turn and how each can best be used to serve the goals of learning.

Classroom Assessment
The first thing that comes to mind for many people when they think of “classroom assessment” is a midterm or end-of-course exam, used by the teacher for summative grading purposes. But such practices represent only a fraction of the kinds of assessment that occur on an ongoing basis in an effective classroom. The focus in this section is on assessments used by teachers to support instruction and learning, also referred to as formative assessment. Such assessment offers considerable potential for improving student learning when informed by research and theory on how students develop subject matter competence.

As instruction is occurring, teachers need information to evaluate whether their teaching strategies are working. They also need information about the current understanding of individual students and groups of students so they can identify the most appropriate next steps for instruction.

Moreover, students need feedback to monitor their own success in learning and to know how to improve. Teachers make observations of student understanding and performance in a variety of ways: from classroom dialogue, questioning, seatwork and homework assignments, formal tests, less formal quizzes, projects, portfolios, and so on.

Black and William (1998) provide an extensive review of more than 250 books and articles presenting research evidence on the effects of classroom assessment. They conclude that ongoing assessment by teachers, combined with appropriate feedback to students, can have powerful and positive effects on achievement. They also report, however, that the characteristics of high-quality formative assessment are not well understood by teachers and

BOX 6–1 Transforming Classroom Assessment Practices
A project at King’s College London (Black and William, 2000) illustrates some of the issues encountered when an effort is made to incorporate principles of cognition and reasoning from evidence into classroom practice. The project involved working closely with 24 science and mathematics teachers to develop their formative assessment practices in everyday classroom work. During the course of the project, several aspects of the teaching and learning process were radically changed.

One such aspect was the teachers’ practices in asking questions in the classroom. In particular, the focus was on the notion of wait time (the length of the silence a teacher would allow after asking a question before speaking again if nobody responded), with emphasis on how short this time usually is. The teachers altered their practice to give students extended time to think about any question posed, often asking them to discuss their ideas in pairs before calling for responses. The practice of students putting up their hands to volunteer answers was forbidden; anyone could be asked to respond. The teachers did not label answers as right or wrong, but instead asked a student to explain his or her reasons for the answer offered. Others were then asked to say whether they agreed and why. Thus questions opened up discussion that helped expose and explore students’ assumptions and reasoning. At the same time, wrong answers became useful input, and the students realized that the teacher was interested in knowing what they thought, not in evaluating whether they were right or wrong. As a consequence, teachers asked fewer questions, spending more time on each.

That formative assessment is weak in practice. High-quality classroom assessment is a complex process, as illustrated by research described in Box 6– 1 that encapsulates many of the points made in the following discussion. In brief, the development of good formative assessment requires radical changes in the ways students are encouraged to express their ideas and in the ways teachers give feedback to students so they can develop the ability to manage and guide their own learning. Where such innovations have been instituted, teachers have become acutely aware of the need to think more clearly about their own assumptions regarding how students learn.

In addition, teachers realized that their lesson planning had to include careful thought about the selection of informative questions. They discovered that they had to consider very carefully the aspects of student thinking that any given question might serve to explore. This discovery led them to work further on developing criteria for the quality of their questions. Thus the teachers confronted the importance of the cognitive foundations for designing assessment situations that can evoke important aspects of student thinking and learning. (See Bonior [1991] and Paranoid [1998]) for further discussion of the importance of high-quality teacher questions for illuminating student thinking.)

In response to research evidence that simply giving grades on written work can be counterproductive for learning (Butler, 1988), teachers began instead to concentrate on providing comments without grades—feedback designed to guide students’ further learning. Students also took part in self-assessment and peer-assessment activities, which required that they understand the goals for learning and the criteria for quality that applied to their work. In these ways, assessment situations became opportunities for learning, rather than activities divorced from learning.

There is a rich literature on how classroom assessment can be designed and used to improve instruction and learning (e.g., Falk, 2000; Neoga, 1995; Shepard, 2000; Staginess, 1997; Wiggins, 1998). This literature presents powerful ideas and practical advice to assist teachers across the K-16 spectrum in improving their classroom assessment practices. We do not attempt to summarize all of the insights and implications for practice presented in this literature. Rather, our emphasis is on what could be gained by thinking about classroom assessment in light of the principles of cognition and reasoning from evidence emphasized throughout this report.

Formative Assessment, Curriculum, and Instruction
How might the culture of classrooms be shifted so that students no longer feign competence or work to perform well on the test as an end separate from real learning. To accomplish this kind of transformation, we have to make assessment more useful, more helpful in learning, and at the same time change the social meaning of evaluation.

Shepard proceeded to discuss ways in which classroom assessment practices need to change: the content and character of assessments need to be significantly improved to reflect contemporary understanding of learning; the gathering and use of assessment information and insights must become a part of the ongoing learning process; and assessment must become a central concern in methods courses in teacher preparation programs. Shepard’s messages were reflective of a growing belief among many educational assessment experts that if assessment, curriculum, and instruction were more integrally connected, student learning would improve.

• A clear view of the learning goals. 
• Information about the present state of the learner. 
• Action to close the gap.

Cognitively Guided Instruction and Assessment 
Carpenter, Enema, and colleagues have demonstrated that teachers who are informed regarding children’s thinking about arithmetic will be in a better position to craft more effective mathematics instruction.

Bottom of Form . Given a student’s solution to a problem, a classroom teacher can modify instruction in a number of ways:

1. By posing a developmentally more difficult or easier problem;
2. By altering the size of the numbers in the set; or
3. By comparing and contrasting students’ solution strategies, so that students can come to appreciate the utility and elegance of a strategy they might not yet be able to generate on their own. For example, a student directly modeling a joining of sets with counters