Category: Assessment (Fall 2011)
Edwin Frankel, CJE, is a veteran educational leader with extensive experience as a head of both day schools and supplementary schools and over twenty-five summers in Jewish camps as an educator. Currently he is the owner of Thrive Jewishly in Columbus, OH, a firm devoted to educational and ritual consulting.
Ed Frankel examines basic issues regarding assessment, and proposes a series of thought questions to help examine our own assessments.
Why must educators assess schools, materials, staff and students, or be assessed themselves. What is the merit, result, goal, effect or benefit of this enterprise. Simply, why bother with assessment?
Educators assess schools, teachers, curricula…. The list of potential foci is endless. Perhaps if they identify why – either in the sense of purpose or cause – it would also help find a best means for assessing.
Jewish educators cannot help but recall the nature of assessments as recalled in the literature of Jewish heritage. Famous assessments include the ten tests of Father Abraham, the reproachments in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the first conversation of the Almighty with Jeremiah, the events of Masa and Merivah, and the investiture of Hillel the Elder, to cite only a few. Reviewing examples of assessment from Jewish literature potentially reveals aims and objectives from our past, the purposes and rationales behind them. From them, perhaps, reasons for assessment in the modern era can be extrapolated. From the historic record, it becomes clear that, on occasion, assessment was done because of an anticipated end. Other times there was a rationale for assessing that was independent of results. Sometimes those two reasons are separate, at others they overlap.
Traditionally the prime reason for assessing is to improve instruction and heighten professional performance. Testing is practiced to determine knowledge of subject matter, to assess qualification for advancement, to select scholarship recipients, to compare performance to a national standard. Other purposes include advertising, public relations, parental involvement, identity formation, checking behavior, directing self improvement, bolstering morale, offering a sense of competence, or creating insight into the divine. There remain unlimited other purposes left to each educator to imagine or identify.
The following is a partial list of purposes and rationales culled for assessment.
- To convey messages or to bolster confidence
- For attainment of or adherence to expectations
- To monitor performance
- To clarify accomplishments or to inform professionals of the client’s/student’s accomplishments
- As qualification for service
- To measure knowledge, learning and/or skills
- To compare practice or performance with benchmarks and standards
- To gauge perceptions of others
- As an integral component of the learning process
The issue sometimes is not only the reasons that educators assess, but why a community demands this process. Recognizing the array of reasons above may not be sufficient for educators and communities to make an informed choice. In the best of worlds power brokers, stakeholders and educators will all be on the same page. Ideally, they distinguish between educational, political and other calls to assess, although the reality of the world in which most educators operate is rarely ideal. Two anecdotes from my own experience demonstrate examples of the challenge educators meet.
Two anecdotes
Consider this event from my past. A committee of parents, teachers and lay leaders designed an innovative report card. It avoided standard grade scales (A = excellent, B = good, etc), sensing that grades are artificial, occasionally demeaning and frequently divisive. The new report card instead listed levels of mastery. Evaluators checked boxes to mark if a specific skill was “mastered,” “introduced but not yet mastered,” or “yet to be introduced.” Instead of grading subjects, each subject was broken into composite skills. By analyzing each, a student’s progress would become evident. The document was loved by its creators. They found the instrument to be clear, easy to complete and utterly fair. Parents (not those on the drafting committee) hated it. For them it was not as important to have a thorough view of a child’s progress as it was important to gain a broad sense of progress with a quick glance. The new form offered an overabundance of information in extremely limited space. Parents wanted a more traditional instrument that revealed less as it described progress with more familiar grades and individualized teacher comments.
Or consider this case. Leaders strive to demonstrate how well their schools compare to competition. In day schools particularly, many want to know how well schools compare academically with local public schools, private schools and prep schools. If a school performs as favorably as competitors, the school might be considered to be doing a great job. But is this true? Often the key for determining this success is standardized tests. Examining outcomes compared with those attained in other schools allows leaders to know where each stands relatively. Tests are not the same. Some offer a better sense of a schools strengths and weaknesses than others. Should comparison to others be so important, or should test instruments focus on areas for future school improvement? In two schools I led, power brokers needed to know where the schools excelled and where significant improvement was evident. The schools purposefully used the same instruments utilized by competing schools that were most admired in the local communities. While self improvement was the purported area of focus, comparison to other schools in the region was clearly an underlying purpose as well. In one case, when outcomes arrived the day school had outpaced the competition. Test outcomes became great fodder for public relations, for student morale building and staff recruitment. However, they provided insufficient information to maximize achievement as they did not accurately reflect school weaknesses, nor did they speak to anything beyond academics. In the other day school experience, it scored in the hundredth percentile, a theoretical impossibility. It was heartwarming to recognize that the day school was at least statistically the best school in the country, but we were lacking meaningful data that we could use to understand our strengths and weaknesses. The excellent outcome afforded little basis to establish improvement, even though it was wonderful for public relations.
Every educator knows that there is much more to a good school than fulfillment of formal, curricular goals. What of the hidden curriculum? School spirit, happiness, interplay of students, student governance, and numerous other areas that are important and should demand new, creative means to be measured. What of involvement in community, devotion to Jewish values, opportunities to make school a microcosm of an ideal society? Achievement tests may be great tools, but they ignore essential, academic and non-academic elements that are often meaningful, valuable and viable measures of success.
Questions to ponder about assessment
As educators examine evaluation means and instruments and try to work more closely with other stakeholders, do they ask needed questions? Several to be considered include:
For whom are test results meant to be meaningful, and for whom will the results truly be? How else can those results be secured?
What is the correlation between assessment method/instrument and school program?
Does assessment honestly reflect learning, intended learning, prospective learning?
Once completed, what will become of the results? Is a plan in place to evaluate, analyze and utilize them? Will they be made public?
Can assessment be accomplished as readily by simple observation, e.g. duck test (if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck….) as a more complex instrument? If the answer is yes, why do anything complex?
Must assessment be onerous and separate from the flow of school practice, or can instruments and means be designed that are more natural and in keeping with the flow of school life?
As outcomes impact a school’s future in foreseen and unforeseen ways, should instruments be found with potential impacts in mind? Will assessment results be sufficiently clear to offer the needed guidance? Does using an instrument with foreseen results taint potential future actions?
Must educators create new tools to gain the information they seek? Can existing tools be utilized or adapted for goals for which they were not designed?
Do we need to develop approaches and instruments to determine what goals should be featured in a program, let alone assessed? Is there a fully objective means to determine which goals are most desirable? Ought there be?
Should there be instruments to assess assessment instruments? How would we use them?
Objective assessments, subjective assessments, standardized assessments, portfolio assessments, pre-tests, post tests, etc. Educators regularly write and use all. Recognizing why we do what we do when we do is as important now as ever.
Note
This article was inspired by a conversation I had with my late father, Max Frankel, shortly before his passing.