ERIC ED357039: Educational Assessment: Expanded Expectations and Challenges.

38 Pages·0.64 MB·English

by  ERIC

DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 357 039
TM 019 746
Linn, Robert L.
AUTHOR
Educational Assessment: Expanded Expectations and
TITLE
Challenges.
INSTITUTION
National Center for Research on Evaluation,
Standards, and Student Testing, Los Angeles, CA.
SPONS AGENCY
Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),
Washington, DC.
CSE-TR-351
REPORT NO
PUB DATE
Jan 93
R117G10027
CONTRACT
38p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
NOTE
American Psychological Association (100th,
Washington, DC, August 14-18, 1992).
Evaluative/Feasibility (142)
Reports
PUB TYPE
Speeches /Conference Papers (150)
EDRS PRICE
MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.
DESCRIPTORS
*Educational Assessment; Educational Change;
Educational Policy; Elementary Secondary Education;
*Evaluation Methods; *Futures (of Society);
Generalization; *National Competency Tests; *Research
Needs; Student Evaluation; Test Construction; *Test
Validity
IDENTIFIERS
Alternative Assessment; Performance Based Evaluation;
*Reform Efforts
ABSTRACT
Current national efforts to expand the role of
educational assessment and radically change the nature of assessment
are discussed. Rationales for expectations that a new national
examination system would serve as a lever of educational reform are
analyzed. Challenges posed for educational measurement by the
proposed heavy reliance on complex, performance-based assessment are
examined in terms of the needed comprehensive validation research.
Particular attention is given to existing generalizability evidence
and the implications of high degree of task specificity in
performance for the design of an assessment system. Nine figures and
one table illustrate the discussion. (Contains 45 references.)
(Author)
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Educational Assessment:
Expanded Expectations and Challenges
Technical Report 351
CSE
Robert L. Linn
CRESST/University of Colorado at Boulder
41.
UCLA Center for the
Study of Evaluation
in collaboration with
University of Colorado
NORC, University
of Chicago
LRDC, University
of Pittsburgh
The RAND
Corporation
ti
BEST COPY MAME
Educational Assessment:
Expanded Expectations and Challenges
CSE Technical Report 351
Robert L. Linn
CRESST/University of Colorado at Boulder
January 1993
Invited Address: Thorndike Award from Division 15, Educational
Psychology, of the American Psychological Association presented at the
annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington,
DC, August 16, 1992.
National Center for Research on Evaluation,
Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST)
Graduate School of Education
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1522
[phone]
wain.
i9u
THE REGENTS OF THE
UNIVPRSITY OF CALIFORNIA
iJ
© Copyright 1993 The Regents of the University of California
The work reported herein was supported in part under the Educational Research and
Development Center Program cooperative agreement R117G10027 and CFDA catalog number
84.117G as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S.
Department of Education.
The findings and opinions expressed in this report do not reflect the position or policies of the
Office of Educational Research and Improvement or the U.S. Department of Education.
Educational Assessment Expanded Expectations and Challenges
Abstract
Current national efforts to expand the role of educational assessment and
radically change the nature of the assessment are discussed.
Rationales for
expectations that a new national examination system would serve as a lever of
educational reform are analyzed.
Challenges posed for educational
measurement by the proposed heavy reliance on complex, performance-based
assessment are examined in terms of the needed comprehensive validation
Particular attention is given to existing general.izability evidence
research.
and the implications of high degree of task specificity in performance for the
design of an assessment system.
iii
;
Educational Assessment Expanded Expectations and Challenges
Robert L. Linn
CRESST/Univetsity of Colorado at Boulder
The recent report "Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right
Questions" (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1992), prepared
at the request of Congress by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA),
documents the central role of educational testing in recent national debates
about educational reform. Although the current emphasis on assessment has
some important new featb...es that I will discuss in some detail, it is hardly a
novelty for testing and assessment to figure prominently in policy makers'
efThrts to reform education. As Madaus (1985) observed several years ago,
"testing is the darling of policy makers across the country" (p. 5).
Similar
statements could have been made at various times during the past century and
a half, most notably during periods when the schools were under attack and
reformers sought to demonstrate the need for change.
As has been true of previous reform efforts, assessment is central to the
First, assessment
current educational reform debate for at least two reasons.
results are relied upon to document the need for change. Second, assessments
are seen as critical agents of reform. Indeed, Petrie (1987) went further when
he argued that "It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that
evaluation and testing have become the engine for implementing educational
policy" (p. 175, emphasis in the original).
The primary focus of this paper is that educational policy makers are
keenly interested in educational assessment and that their greatly expanded,
and sometimes unrealistic, expectations, together with the current press for
radical changes in the nature of assessments, represent major challenges for
educational measurement. First, however, I will discuss the attraction that
assessment results have for policy makers.
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Barometer of Educational Quality
Educational assessments are often rather naively expected to serve as a
Such an expectation
kind of impartial barometer of educational quality.
makes assessment results of particular interest and value to various types of
In this regard, policy makers have often pointed to educational
policy makers.
assessment results in order to demonstrate educational shortcomings.
The OTA report provides a brief recounting of this history of testing in
American schools from the time that Horace Mann introduced written
examinations in the mid-19th century. The OTA report (U.S. Congress, Office
of Technology Assessment, 1992) summarized the view that tests could
document the need for change as follows:
The idea underlying the implementation of written examinations, that they could
provide information about student learning, was born in the minds of individuals
already convinced that education was substandard. This sequenceperception of
failure followed by the collection of data designed to document failure (or
success)offers early evidence of what has become a tradition of school reform and
a truism of student testing: tests are often administered not just to discover how
well schools or kids are doing, but rather to obtain external confirmation
validationof the hypothesis that they are not doing well at all.
(p. 108. emphasis
in the original)
More recent examples where test results have been used to document the
need for reform are plentiful, but two will suffice to make the point. The June
6, 1991 press conference for the release of the first state-by-state results of the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (N \EP) in mathematics was
used by Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander o say that the results should
serve as a "wake up America call."
According to Secretary Alexander, "The
big news is: None of the states is cutting it." In the second example, President
Bush relied on a much less relevant source of test data for purposes of drawing
inferences about schools when he made the following comments regarding the
release of SAT results in the fall of 1991. "Last week we learned SAT scores
had fallen again. Scores on the Verbal SAT have tumbled to the lowest level
ever. These numbers tell us our schools are in trouble" (cited by Jaeger, 1992).
The remainder of this paper could be used to analyze what is wrong with
this type of use of SAT results, but that is not my focus today and, in any event,
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that has already been done on several occasions (e.g., Linn, 1987; Wainer,
It is worth noting, however, that despite the negative picture, there is
1986).
considerable evidence regarding improvements in achievement that the critics
choose not to acknowledge. For example, even if it were reasonable to use
aggregate SAT results as an indicator of educational progress, results
presented by Carson, Huelskamp, and Woodall (1991) and discussed by
Berliner (1992), and by Jaeger (1992), demonstrate that the global comparisons
of cross-sectional results for different years hide more than they reveal.
Jaeger's ',1992) discussion is particularly telling:
As Carson and his colleagues (Carson, Huelskamp and Woodall. 1991) have
illustrated, the SAT score decline is a perfect example of Simpson's Paradox.
Although the mean score of the total SAT test-taking population has declined, the
mean score of every major racial and ethnic group that composes the population of
SAT test-takers has increased during the last 15 years. Comparison of the mean
performances of the population of SAT test-takers today and the population of test-
takers fifteen or twenty years ago, unadjusted for changes in the test-taking
population, can only produce seriously misguided conclusions.
(pp. 7-8)
Turning to the potentially more informative NAEP results, it should be
noted that Secretary Alexander's analysis of the cross-sectional results in
mathematics does not take into account trend data that show improvements in
mathematics achievement especially during the 1980s (see Jaeger, 1992; Linn,
in press; Mullis, Dossey, Foertsch, Jones, & Gentile, 1991). As can be seen in
Figure 1, the performance of African-American students on the NAEP
mathematics scale was significantly higher at all three age levels in 1990 than
it was in 1978. The performance of White and Hispanic students also was
higher in 1990 than in 1978 at all three age levels, but the differences were not
significant for 17-year-olds. For the 1990 bridge samples, the within-grade
standard deviations ranged from 31 to 33. In other words, a difference of about
16 points represents an effect size of about .5.
Thus, most of the differences
shown in Figure 1 are large enough to be of practical as well as statistical
significance.
Although policy makers seeking reform make great use of test results to
argue the case that education is inadequate, others with an intere t in the
status quo, of course, emphasize quite different results. As was demonstrated
Figure 1
Changes in Average Performance on the
Overall NAEP Mathematics Scale Between
1978 and 1990 (Based on Mullis, Dossey,
& Gentile,
Foertsch, Jones,
1991)
E
White
African American
Ra
Hispanic
21'
0
C
cd
13 17
9
Age
Significant increase In Mean (p < .05)
1.
4
in articles on the Lake Wobegon effect (e.g., Cannell, 1987, 1988; Linn, Graue,
& Sanders, 1990), reports comparing student achievement to outdated national
norms for the form of a test that has been used year after year in a state or
school district have provided misleadingly positive impressions of student
achievement in individual states and districts.
Figure 2 shows results from a study that I have worked on in
collaboration with Dan Koretz, Lorrie Shepard, Steve Dunbar, Freddy Hiebert,
and Bobbie Flexer (e.g., Koretz, Linn, Dunbar, & Shepard, 1991).
The
operational test results in two districts using different norm-referenced tests
in relatively high-stakes testing programs are contrasted with results of
administrations of alternative tests that were constructed to cover the same
content objectives and then equated to the district norm-referenced tests using
samples of students from other districts where the norm-referenced test in
question was not used. There is good generalization regarding mean student
performance in only one of the four contrasts (mathematics in district A).
In
the other three contrasts, the operational test provides an inflated impression
of student achievement in comparison to the alternative test.
The possibly obvious point is that considerable caution is needed in using
achievement test results to draw inferences about the quality of education.
Despite the pitfalls, however, policy makers attempting to provide support for
current practice, as well as those trying to undermine it, continue to rely
heavily on test results to make their case.
Instrument of Reform
Issues regarding the uses and misuses of educational assessment results
to draw inferences about the quality of education are worthy of more detailed
discussion, but the fowls of the remainder of this paper is on a second use of
That is the use of a
: essments not just as a
educational assessment.
barometer of educational conditions but as an instrument of reform.
Educational assessments are expected not only to serve as a monitor of
educational achievement but to be powerful tools of educational reform.
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