Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment

Constructivism! The increase in frequency with which this word appears in the discourse of educational research, theory, and policy is truly remarkable. Unfortunately much of the discussion is at the level of slogan and cliche even bromide. "Students should construct their own knowledge" is being reverentially chanted throughout the halls of many a school/college/department of education these days, and any approach that is other than constructivist is characterized as promoting passive, rote, and sterile learning. For example, consider Rogoff's (1994) description of what she calls the adult-run model of how learning occurs:

Constructivism: Implications for the Design and Delivery of Instruction

Este libro describe un importante conjunto de habilidades clave que aumentan el aprendizaje mas profundo, la preparacion para la universidad y la carrera, el aprendizaje centrado en el estudiante y el pensamiento de orden superior. Estas etiquetas incluyen habilidades cognitivas y no cognitivas, como pensamiento critico, resolucion de problemas, colaboracion, comunicacion efectiva, motivacion, persistencia y aprender a aprender. Las habilidades del siglo XXI tambien incluyen creatividad, innovacion y etica que son importantes para el exito posterior y pueden desarrollarse en entornos de aprendizaje formales o informales. Este informe tambien describe como estas habilidades se relacionan entre si y con las habilidades y contenidos academicos mas tradicionales en las disciplinas clave de lectura, matematicas y ciencias. Educacion para la vida y el trabajo: Desarrollar conocimientos y habilidades transferibles en el siglo XXI resume los hallazgos de la investigacion que investiga la importancia de tales habilidades para el exito en la educacion, el trabajo y otras areas de responsabilidad adulta y que demuestra la importancia de desarrollar estas habilidades. en la educacion K-16. En este informe, se identifican caracteristicas relacionadas con el aprendizaje de estas habilidades, que incluyen desarrollo profesional docente, curriculo, evaluacion, programas extraescolares y extraescolares y centros de aprendizaje informal como exhibiciones y museos.

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century

Authentic and direct assessments of performances and products are examined in the light of contrasting functions and purposes having implications for validation, especially with respect to the need for specialized validity criteria tailored for performance assessment. These include contrasts between performances and products, between assessment of performance per se and performance assessment of competence or other constructs, between structured and unstructured problems and response modes, and between breadth and depth of domain coverage. These distinctions are elaborated in the context of an overarching contrast between task-driven and construct-driven performance assessment. Rhetoric touting performance assessments because they eschew decomposed skills and decontextualized tasks is viewed as misguided, in that component skills and abstract problems have a legitimate place in pedagogy. Hence, the essence of authentic assessment must be sought elsewhere, that is, in the quest for complete construct repre...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1176219

The Interplay of Evidence and Consequences in the Validation of Performance Assessments

The instructional technology community is in the midst of a philosophical shift from a behaviorist to a constructivist framework, a move that may begin to address the growing rift between formal school learning and real-life learning. One theory of learning that has the capacity to promote authentic learning is that of situated learning.

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An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on assessment results, as well as increasing concern about the nature of the most widely used forms of student assessment and uses that are made of the results. These conflicting forces have helped create a burgeoning interest in alternative forms of assessments, particularly complex, performance-based assessments. It is argued that there is a need to rethink the criteria by which the quality of educational assessments are judged, and a set of criteria that are sensitive to some of the expectations for performance-based assessments is proposed.

Complex, Performance-Based Assessment: Expectations and Validation Criteria

Background: Associations between early mother–child mutually responsive orientation (MRO) and children's conscience have been previously established, but the mechanisms accounting for those links are not understood. We examined three such mediational mechanisms: (a) the child's enhanced enjoyment of interactions with the mother, (b) increased committed, self-regulated compliance with the mother, and/or (c) a decreased need for maternal use of power assertion. Children's conscience was seen as a complex system encompassing moral emotion (guilt), conduct, and cognition.

Methods:  In a longitudinal design, MRO was observed in mothers’ and children's multiple naturalistic interactions at 9, 14, and 22 months. The mediators were observed at 33 months. Children's conscience was observed at 45 months (moral emotion) and at 56 months (moral conduct and cognition).

Results:  The mediating paths were different for the three components of conscience. MRO had a direct, unmediated effect on moral emotion. MRO influenced moral conduct through two mediational paths: by promoting the child's enjoyment of interactions with the mother and by enhancing committed compliance. MRO influenced moral cognition by promoting the child's enjoyment of mother–child interactions. Maternal power assertion did not mediate the relation between MRO and conscience once the influence of the other mediators was considered.

Conclusions:  The impact of the early mother–child relationship on future conscience appears to be a complex process that progresses along distinct paths.

Pathways to conscience: early mother–child mutually responsive orientation and children's moral emotion, conduct, and cognition

AUTHOR Koretz, Daniel M.; And Others TITLE The Effects of High-Stakes Testing on Achievement: Prel.I.minary Findings about Generalization across Tests. SPONS AGENCY Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Los Angeles, CA.; Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC.; Spencer Foundation, Chicago, Ill. PUB DATE Apr 91 NOTE 38p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association (Chicago, IL, April 3-7, 1991) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (Chicago, IL, April 4-6, 1J91). PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143) -Speeches/Conference Papers (150)

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The Effects of High-Stakes Testing On Achievement: Preliminary Findings About Generalization Across Tests

The purpose of this study was to investigate the power and Type I error rate of the likelihood ratio goodness-of-fit (LR) statistic in detecting differential item functioning (DIF) under Samejima's (1969, 1972) graded response model. A multiple-replication Monte Carlo study was utilized in which DIF was modeled in simulated data sets which were then calibrated with MULTILOG (Thissen, 1991) using hierarchically nested item response models. In addition, the power and Type I error rate of the Mantel (1963) approach for detecting DIF in ordered response categories were investigated using the same simulated data, for comparative purposes. The power of both the Mantel and LR procedures was affected by sample size, as expected. The LR procedure lacked the power to consistently detect DIF when it existed in reference/focal groups with sample sizes as small as 500/500. The Mantel procedure maintained control of its Type I error rate and was more powerful than the LR procedure when the comparison group ability distributions were identical and there was a constant DIF pattern. On the other hand, the Mantel procedure lost control of its Type I error rate, whereas the LR procedure did not, when the comparison groups differed in mean ability; and the LR procedure demonstrated a profound power advantage over the Mantel procedure under conditions of balanced DIF in which the comparison group ability distributions were identical. The choice and subsequent use of any procedure requires a thorough understanding of the power and Type I error rates of the procedure under varying conditions of DIF pattern, comparison group ability distributions.–or as a surrogate, observed score distributions–and item characteristics.

Stephen B. Dunbar

Papers

Complex, Performance-Based Assessment: Expectations and Validation Criteria

Pathways to conscience: early mother–child mutually responsive orientation and children's moral emotion, conduct, and cognition

The Effects of High-Stakes Testing On Achievement: Preliminary Findings About Generalization Across Tests

An Investigation of the Power of the Likelihood Ratio Goodness-of-Fit Statistic in Detecting Differential Item Functioning.

Corrections for range restriction: An empirical investigation of conditions resulting in conservative corrections.