Alternative Assessment Practices Research Articles

Why Talk About Different Ways to Grade? The Shift from Traditional Assessment to Alternative Assessment

AbstractNational reform efforts challenge the use of traditional assessment methods and argue for alternative assessment practices such as performance‐based assessment, portfolio assessment, and authentic assessment.

Teaching Mathematics and Science in Urban Elementary Schools

Elementary teachers from a large urban school district with a 74 percent minority student population were surveyed to assess their capacity to provide quality mathematics and science instruction. Forty‐nine percent of the surveys distributed to a random sample of teachers were returned. Both strengths and barriers to capacity building were identified. Strengths included use of collaborative student work, manipulatives, informal learning environments, and alternative assessment practices; availability of calculators and computers; and high expectations for student learning. Barriers included lack of professional development, infrequent science instruction, limited calculator use, lack of planning time, inadequate resources, and the perception that science was not valued as highly as mathematics.

Mathematics Assessment: Practices and Reporting Methods

The curriculum, teaching, and assessment Standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics advocate the use of various assessment techniques in mathematics, K‐12. Practitioners from 35 school districts in two regions of a midwestern state completed a questionnaire and reported information about their assessment practices, reporting methods, and other issues that affect change in mathematics. The results of the survey suggest that current reporting practices are limiting the use of alternative classroom assessment practices. Delays in the use of alternative mathematics assessment practice can probably be expected until the reporting systems used in school districts become consistent with the assessment systems and teachers participate in ongoing professional development programs to learn more about alternative assessment practices.

A Short Guide to Alternative Assessment Practices

Over the past decade, assessment in the arts has become the object of increasingly close scrutiny in North America. That state of affairs in which classroom teachers made their own unchallenged judgments about the artistic ability of their students has been challenged by the possibility of creating statewide benchmarks for performance. The rhetoric associated with state-wide assessment has outstripped delivery in at least two ways. First, the achievement of state-wide measures of performance remains largely unsustained. Finlayson (1989) noted that in the late 1980s, only twelve states, and the District of Columbia, in the United States purported to conduct state level visual art assessment, and of those thirteen, only six had actually developed standardized instruments. No comparable data exist in Canada, because province-wide testing in the arts has never been attempted. Second, the presence of tests is no guarantee of their quality. In one supersession at the NAEA conference in Atlanta, in 1991, the audience was treated to some pitiable evidence of what art assessment means in some states where paper-and-pencil tests are employed. Asked to promote and support what sometimes seems a trivial pursuit, teachers may understandably react as Karen does: a teacher in New York, and the central figure in a case study on school assessment practices, she refuses to emphasize the tests during the year, gives them back with barely disguised distaste, and pays no attention to the results (Jervis, 1991, p. 19).

Redefining the Wisc-R: Implications for Professional Practice and Public Policy

The factor structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (Wechsler, 1974) was examined in the standardization sample using methodological advances in exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Three competing models were evaluated: (a) a one-factor model, (b) an oblique (or correlated) two-factor model, and (c) an oblique three-factor model. Because of high correlations across factors, the discriminant validity of the two- and three-factor models was problematic. The substantial overlap across factors was most parsimoniously represented by a single general factor, consistent with the interpretations of O'Grady (1989). The competing factor models are discussed in relation to treatment utility and alternative assessment practices. Given the widespread use of the scale, the issues are of critical importance to public policy regarding the purposes and outcomes of special education assessments.

An interpretation of assessment methods in middle school science

Current calls for reform in science education include changes in assessment practices of teachers. However, little attention is given to how these changes are to take place and why teachers feel their current assessment practices are valid. This study was concerned with the extent to which teachers could incorporate alternative assessment practices into their middle school science curriculum. This interpretive study of the use of alternative methods to assess student learning investigated factors which influenced the validity of assessment tasks and those that determined how a teacher assessed student learning. Validity was interpreted from a constructivist perspective. Three assertions emerged from the study: (1) cognitive referents influence a teacher's actions regarding assessment; (2) current assessment practices of teachers do not provide valid measures of what students know. Tasks and systems of aggregating scores often reward completion of tasks and motivation to learn rather than what is known; (3) a major threat to the validity of an assessment is the extent to which students can construct the meanings of tasks intended by the examiner and the extent to which the examiner can construct the meaning of responses of students.