Using Research to Improve Large Scale Assessments

This weeks papers made me realise how easy it is to become complacent with one’s assessment practices. While I have worked very hard to make my math classes more accessible to students I don’t t really challenge my assessment practices, even after being part of a pilot for a reform assessment program (all subjects). I changed my practices, but don’t routinely question my assessment practices. I am fairly comfortable with other teachers watching my teaching, but I would be very uncomfortable with having others examine my assessment practices.

In assessing, I will now be looking for systematic biases (do I assume students with IEPs know less for the same written content?) and want to look at recorded biases against specific groups. Also I recently had a long conversation with a mother of smart boys who get discouraged by unclear evaluations. My own daughter (grade 11 functions) just got discouraged by a rubric marking rather than simply right or wrong. The rubric was bang on, but my daughter had truely never been graded on communication and thinking before.

Unlike some in the class, I didn’t see the articles as complete critiques of the EQAO and teacher assessment practices, rather a call for further improvements. There have been changes to EQAO since this report. I have noticed that recent EQAOs do not have questions broken into parts see question above or http://www.eqao.com/Educators/Secondary/09/BookletsandGuides.aspx?Lang=E&gr=09&yr=10

And the students get one mark that encompasses all categories. So I wonder if EQAO now has a clearer matrix as to which topics are covered to ensure more consistency to the curriculum and year to year.

Our board has been using moderated marking with grade 9 teachers for 3-4 years to help teachers prepare for the test. It has helped change teacher attitudes about what is important to teach. I think our students are seeing more rich problems and understanding what good answers look like (with flexibility). We have now extended it to all college and Workplace math teachers to push their assessments and learning activities from short calculations to richer problems. So even if the current EQAO isn’t promoting investigations it is promoting rich tasks.

I appreciated the Morgan & Watson article because it provided a vision of how assessment of investigations could occur- using moderated marking to develop more consistent assessment practices and then have teachers assess in class investigations with an consistent evaluation rubric and possible invigilation. The current Ontario “summative project” with little guidance and only an exemplar is not pushing more investigations in the classroom. If this is a important goal for the Ontario curriculum, Morgan & Watson provide some guidelines to creating an somewhat equitable assessment of investigations. As Suurtamm Lawson and Koch argue, assessments “defin[e] what is worth knowing, hence what is worth focusing on in classrooms” ( p.41).