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Assessment, Student Confidence, and School Success Mr. Stiggins questions the notion that intimidation by assessment will lead to more effective schools, and he offers an alternative vision in which we use assessment to build student confidence in the service of school improvement. By Richard J. Stiggins |
THE TIME has come to fundamentally rethink the relationship between assessment and effective schooling. This reevaluation must center not on how we assess student achievement but on how we use assessment in pursuit of student success.
We have a long tradition of striving to weave assessment into our school improvement equations. These efforts have focused almost totally on the use of standardized tests to enhance the effectiveness of schools. I believe that those efforts have been shortsighted because they have been founded on a set of naive assumptions about the relationship between assessment and student and teacher motivation.
Students succeed academically only if they want to succeed and feel capable of doing so. If they lack either desire or confidence, they will not be successful. Therefore, the essential question is a dual one: How do we help our students want to learn and feel capable of learning?
Historically, we have built our answer to this question on several assumptions. We assume that we can stimulate maximum teacher effort and student learning by threatening public embarrassment for both students and teachers if students don't succeed academically. We assume that the reason students do not learn is that teachers and students are not putting forth the effort required to succeed. Thus the key to success is to find ways to compel students and teachers to work harder. And the conventional wisdom has been that the way to spur greater effort is through intimidation by means of the threat of dire consequences for low test scores.
In this article, I question the notion that intimidation by assessment will lead to more effective schools. Then I offer an alternative vision in which we use assessment to build student confidence in the service of school improvement.
Our Assessment Traditions
Evidence of the strength of our collective belief that assessment for public accountability paves the way to school improvement can be seen in the history of large-scale assessment programs. We began to manifest this belief in the 1930s with the implementation of the "College Boards," a college admissions test that quickly turned into far more than that. These tests -- also known as the SAT -- became very important national measures of school accountability, too. If scores trend upward, the American education system is doing well. If they trend downward, stinging indictments of school quality pour forth from all sides. It's not uncommon for those in positions of political vulnerability to admonish teachers to "raise our average SAT scores." Thus accountability for test scores is viewed as the key to productive educational change.
In the 1950s and 1960s, we added commercially developed, norm-referenced, districtwide standardized testing programs in an effort to achieve local accountability. Ever since, superintendents and others in positions of authority have threatened drastic action if scores do not continually improve.
The 1970s became the decade of the statewide testing program. We began the decade with three statewide assessments and ended it with nearly 40. Today, virtually every state has one. Legislatures promise their constituents that scores will go up or heads will roll -- a thinly veiled threat intended to spur educators to work harder.
In the 1970s and 1980s, we implemented a national assessment program. In the 1980s and 1990s, we have discovered the political power of international assessments. Recent reports of math and science results in the media have led to worries that we had better raise our standing among the nations of the world or risk social and economic decay.
Thus we see layer upon layer of tests, each new test expected to accomplish what the prior layers had not done -- spark productive school improvement. Each new test is supposed to raise local educators' anxiety to a sufficiently high level that they will begin to work hard enough to promote greater student achievement and higher test scores.
Let me be very clear. I am not rejecting the value of standardized testing. To be sure, pressure on students, teachers, and administrators to meet high academic standards as reflected in high test scores certainly can lead to productive work for many. Furthermore, the assessment results can inform very important policy and programmatic decisions. But such testing by itself cannot produce the desired school improvement, because the tests do not deal directly with matters of teacher effectiveness or student motivation.
Unwanted Consequences
As a matter of fact, the pressure to do well on high-stakes testing can sometimes have exactly the opposite effect from the one we seek. To see how this can happen for teachers, consider the following hypothetical situation. What if low student achievement has its origins not in a lack of effort on the part of teachers but in the fact that teachers are not being given access to the expertise, time, and other resources needed to raise student achievement and test scores? And further, what if one result of this lack of support is day-to-day learning experiences and classroom assessments that fail to focus effectively on the desired achievement standards? Under these circumstances, is the threat of sanctions for low standardized test scores likely to lead to productive action? I think not. Under such conditions, effective instruction would remain out of reach, regardless of what is done by way of state assessment. A far more likely result would be intense anxiety on the part of teachers, who don't know what to do to survive in this kind of evaluation environment.
What happens when we raise people's anxiety levels by threatening public disclosure of their ineffectiveness and then fail to give them the tools they need to deal with that increased tension? And what if we fall into the habit of doing this repeatedly year after year? I submit that teachers trapped in these circumstances are likely to respond in one or all of the following ways. Teachers will either:
Obviously, these are not actions that are likely to lead to enhanced student achievement.
For students, increasing pressure to score high on tests, combined with a lack of focused opportunities to learn, can lead to a sense of futility -- a feeling of hopelessness -- that can cause them to stop caring and stop trying. For many of them, consistent evidence of poor performance repeatedly reported to their families or to the public can result in a profound and long-lasting loss of confidence. Those who stop believing that they are capable of learning will stop trying. Those who stop trying stop learning. Surely that is not the effect we desire from our high-stakes testing programs.
When unsupported and angry teachers rely on potentially counterproductive instructional strategies to teach students, who regard academic success as beyond their reach and who have stopped caring, is the result likely to be significant school improvement? Is the result likely to be an increase in the proportion of our students who meet state or local academic standards?
This is precisely why I am suggesting that the time has come to reevaluate our heavy reliance on high-pressure assessment for public accountability as our primary tactic for attaining excellence in education. Let me repeat that I am not urging that we stop such testing. Policy and programmatic decision makers need assessment results that are comparable across classrooms in order to do their jobs. But I am also suggesting that the most important decisions -- those that determine whether a school works or not -- should not be made on the basis of once-a-year tests. In the classrooms and living rooms of the nation, students, teachers, and parents make many critical decisions on the basis of evidence gathered in day-to-day classroom assessments. These are the assessments that inform the day-to-day decisions that lead to learning and that motivate learners to believe in or lose faith in and reject their own academic potential. Yet these are the assessments that we have all but ignored in our journey to school improvement.
Rethinking the Role of Assessment
As policy makers have intensified our reliance on high-stakes standardized testing at all levels, considerations of the quality of the assessments have become increasingly important. The higher the stakes (e.g., if high school graduation hangs in the balance), the greater the expertise we must bring to bear to create psychometrically sound assessments. The standards of test quality to which we must adhere are clear and nonnegotiable. The past two decades have witnessed important advances in the assessment community's ability to create new tests that produce accurate information about student achievement. As a result, the vast majority of assessments currently in use in districtwide, statewide, national, and international assessment programs meet accepted standards of technical quality.
But the cost of achieving high quality at so many different levels of large-scale assessment has been astronomical, not just in dollars spent but also in opportunities lost. We have focused so heavily on the development of ever more sophisticated psychometrics and test development tactics for our high-stakes tests that we have almost completely ignored the other 99% of the assessments that happen in a student's life. These are the assessments developed and used by their teachers in the classroom. If we seek excellence in education, then the time has come to invest whatever it takes to ensure that every teacher is gathering dependable information about student learning day to day and week to week and knows how to use it to benefit students.
This action must be central to all future school improvement efforts, because, if assessment is not working effectively in our classrooms every day, then assessment at all other levels (district, state, national, or international) represents a complete waste of time and money. As stark as this statement seems, careful reflection will lead the reader to understand that no once-a-year standardized assessment can overcome the dire consequences for students that are caused by the ongoing mismeasurement of their achievement. There is not a school board member, legislator, or superintendent of schools whose policies can fix the problems that result from the routine use of inaccurate classroom assessments: misdiagnosis of student needs, misunderstanding of how fast or slowly students are learning, or the assignment of report card grades that systematically misrepresent real student learning.
Without high-quality classroom assessment, instruction cannot work, and schools cannot be effective. Yet consider the record of our failure to invest in the accuracy and effective use of classroom assessment. We have failed to impose licensing standards that require teachers to be competent in assessment in order to practice. We have failed to provide preservice teachers with the training they need to assess accurately.1 We have failed to prepare principals to provide proper supervision of and leadership in classroom assessment.2 We have failed to invest in the ongoing professional development needed to ensure accurate classroom assessment.3
We will begin to reform our assessment systems productively when we realize that we must blend high-quality standardized testing programs with high-quality classroom assessment in balanced assessment systems. We have been grossly out of balance in this regard for decades, and this must change if students are to meet high standards.
Research Support
We have reason to believe that an investment in the quality of classroom assessment will pay major dividends. English researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam recently published the results of a comprehensive meta-analysis and synthesis of more than 40 controlled studies of the impact of improved classroom assessment on subsequent student success as reflected in summative assessments.4
They report consistent and sizable gains in standardized test scores directly attributable to prior differences in teachers' classroom assessment practices. Specifically, they uncovered effects of enhanced classroom assessment of a magnitude that can raise student performance on summative assessments by 0.4 to 0.7 of a standard deviation. Effects of this size, if actually realized in familiar contexts, would translate into:
Furthermore, Black and Wiliam continue, "These studies exhibit another important feature. Many of them show that improved formative assessment helps the (so-called) low attainers more than the rest, and so reduces the spread of attainment while also raising it overall" (emphasis in original).5
Two other important features characterize many of the studies integrated into the Black and Wiliam synthesis:
Underlying the various approaches [to improving classroom assessment] are assumptions about what makes for effective learning -- in particular that students have to be actively involved [in the assessment process].
The ways in which assessment can affect the motivation and self-esteem of pupils and the benefits of engaging pupils in self-assessment suggest that both deserve careful attention.6
Black and Wiliam go on to detail compelling evidence from around the world of inadequacies in teacher preparation for classroom assessment that consistently give rise to problems of quality control in classroom assessment. These difficulties have also been well documented in previous research reviews published in the U.S.7 According to Black and Wiliam, "pupils can only assess themselves when they have a sufficiently clear picture of the targets that they are learning." And many pupils lack such a picture and "appear to have become accustomed to receiving classroom teaching as an arbitrary sequence of exercises with no overarching rationale."8
Moreover, Black and Wiliam cite research studies that have shown that "if pupils are given only marks or grades, they do not benefit from the feedback on their work." Their worst-case scenario involves pupils who get low marks this time, got low marks last time, and expect to get low marks next time. This becomes "a shared belief between them and their teacher that they are just not clever enough."9 Black and Wiliam then proceed to argue strongly, on the basis of their research, that we must invest in long-term professional development to enhance the quality and effectiveness of classroom assessments. They conclude:
The main plank of our argument is that standards are raised only by changes which are put into direct effect by teachers and pupils in classrooms. There is a body of firm evidence that formative assessment is an essential feature of classroom work and that development of it can raise standards. We know of no other way of raising standards for which such a strong prima facie case can be made on the basis of such large learning gains.
Our educational system has been subjected to many far-reaching initiatives which, while taken in reaction to concerns against existing practices, have been based on little evidence about their potential to meet those concerns. In our study of formative assessment there can be seen, for once, firm evidence that indicates clearly a direction for change which would improve learning. Our plea is that national policy will grasp this opportunity and give lead to it. (Emphasis in original.)10
Considering Alternatives
In part, this research reminds us that primary responsibility for academic success does not reside with teachers, principals, superintendents, parents, or any other adult involved in the education system. It rests with the learners. Our challenge always has been and always will be finding productive ways to motivate them. This leads to the essential questions: How can we help our students want to learn? How do we encourage them to go on internal control and take responsibility for maximizing their own success? Of the following pairs of alternatives, which seem the most likely to work?
For many decades in American education, educators didn't need to worry about motivating all students. Those who were motivated tended to work hard and learn a lot. They occupied high places in the rank order. Those who were unmotivated and did not learn were available to fill the lower ranks. The result was a dependable ranking of students. Thus schools could serve their socially appointed purpose of sorting students and channeling them into the various segments of our social and economic system.
But during the 1990s society has changed the mission of schools. Society now wants more than merely a dependable rank ordering at the end of high school. It now wants all students to meet high academic standards -- to become competent readers, writers, and mathematical problem solvers. That change in mission leaves educators facing the challenge of finding ways to motivate all students, not just the traditional winners. And if we educators do not succeed in motivating all students, we will fail to complete our assigned mission.
Thus we will be reforming our assessment environments productively when we use classroom assessment not merely as a sorting mechanism but as a means of expanding the range of students who want to succeed and who feel capable of doing so.
Rethinking the Link Between Assessment and Motivation
Return to the essential question posed above: How do we help our students want to learn? According to our traditions, we tell them: "You should work hard and learn a lot because, if you succeed, you will attain high scores on assignments, classroom tests, and quizzes. This will lead to high grades, and they will lead to college and to good jobs. If you work hard and learn a lot, good things will come your way." Or we deliver the negative version of this same message: "If you do not work hard and learn a lot, you will accrue low test scores, resulting in failing grades, no college, and bad jobs. Fail to put forth the effort and learn a lot, and bad things will happen to you." Clearly, these two messages represent our best attempts to use assessment and evaluation as means of managing schedules of reward and punishment in order to cause students to behave in academically responsible ways.
As we relate assessment to student motivation in these terms, I have the sense that we are harking back to the principles of learning that we encountered as undergraduates in our introductory educational psychology course. Remember studying operant and respondent conditioning? Remember studying pigeons pecking at dots to receive seeds and rats learning to press levers to avoid a painful electrical shock? We learned about schedules of reinforcement and punishment and about perpetuating desired behaviors and extinguishing undesirable ones. Behavior management leads to learning, we learned. So apply these motivational principles in the classroom.
But here is the flaw in this simplistic way of thinking. Young people are far more complex organisms than pigeons and rats. Among the differences is the essential fact that students can reason. They can and do use their reasoning powers to figure out how to survive in a behavior management system that is driven by rewards and punishments.
Sometimes the survival strategies they use lead to a great deal of learning. When students decide to manage the potential risk of punishment by studying very hard and learning a lot, then the behavior management system works as desired. Students who respond in this way will meet our new high achievement standards.
Unfortunately, sometimes the strategies students select lead in exactly the opposite direction. What if a student decides to manage the risk of failure by cheating? Does that lead to maximal learning? What if some learners fail to learn early in their school years and so lack the prerequisites for that which follows, thus becoming chronic failures and losing confidence? Learners who come to believe that failure is inevitable develop a sense of futility and hopelessness -- a belief that success is beyond their reach. Slowly, over time, they stop trying. How likely are these students to meet our new high achievement standards?
Every teacher in every classroom knows exactly who these students are. No level of intimidation will change their view of themselves. No statewide assessments and no threat of an "F" on their report cards will bring them to believe in themselves as learners. These students have not met state standards, and many don't believe that they can. What's more, they have stopped caring.
What is our responsibility with respect to these students? Should we merely write them off? We used to do just that, and they would occupy the low spots in the rank order. But if educators are to be evaluated on the basis of increasing the percentage of students who meet standards over time, these are the very students whose achievement status we must work to change. Clearly the motivational model upon which we have based the American educational process -- the manipulation of rewards and punishments -- will not work with these students. So how can we motivate them to become partners in the pursuit of their own and our success?
A Different Vision of Assessment and Motivation
Our collective challenge comes in two parts. We must strive to 1) keep students from losing confidence in themselves as learners to begin with and 2) rekindle confidence among those students who have lost that confidence.
It's tempting to conceive of the latter situation as a problem with self-concept, that is, as a personal/emotional issue. If we can just raise these students' self-concept, they will become capable learners. I believe that looking at the problem in this way is counterproductive, because it comes at the problem from the wrong direction. Instead, we need to see the problem first as a classroom assessment problem.
If these students are to come to believe in themselves, then they must first experience some believable form of academic success as reflected in a real classroom assessment. Even a small success can rekindle a small spark of confidence that, in turn, encourages more trying. If that new trying brings more success, then students' academic self-concept will begin to change. Our goal is to perpetuate this cycle. To see classic examples of this principle at work, go back and view again such movies as To Sir with Love, Stand and Deliver, or Mister Holland's Opus. Each teacher uses the assessment process to build confidence, which ultimately pays off in prominent ways.
The direction of the effect is critical. First comes academic success, then comes confidence. With increased confidence comes the belief that learning just might be worth a try. Students must experience success in terms of specifically focused, rigorous academic attainments -- not as general, often misleading, and manipulative statements, such as "It's good that you're trying harder." Merely trying is not the issue here. Focused effort with an expectation of success is needed. Students must come honestly to believe that what counts -- indeed the only thing that counts here -- is the learning that results from the effort expended. They must perceive effort that does not produce learning as just not good enough. Further, if our students are sincerely trying to do the things we suggest and if they are not finding success, then we had better change the things they are doing.
The evidence that students need to renew their faith in themselves as learners cannot come from a once-a-year district, state, national, or international assessment. It must come moment by moment through continuous classroom assessment. This places the classroom teacher directly at the heart of the connection between assessment and school effectiveness.
Thus the essential school improvement question from the point of view of assessment is, Are we skilled enough to use assessment either to keep all learners from losing confidence in themselves to begin with or to rebuild that confidence once it has been destroyed?
For students for whom the judicious use of rewards and punishments works to accomplish this end, teachers can rely on those methods. But what do we do when that system has lost its motivational power in the eyes of some (perhaps many!) students?
There are alternatives to our tradition of manipulating rewards and punishments. We can turn to a constellation of three tools that, taken together, permit us to tap an unlimited wellspring of motivation that resides within each learner. These tools are
Together, these tools redefine how we use assessment to turn students on to the power and joy of learning. Here's why.
The teacher's instructional task is to take students to the edge of their capabilities, so that they can grow from there. But, from the student's point of view, stepping off that edge can be risky. "What if I try and fail? My parents will ground me!" So the teacher's instructional challenge is to help each student arrive at his or her personal edge with the confidence needed to risk the failure that might result from stepping off the edge. Our students must understand that, when we try to grow, we sometimes fail at first, and that failure is all right. The trick is to help students understand that failure holds the seeds of later success.
In other words, we must stop delivering the message to students that failure is a bad thing. Failure is inevitable, especially when we are trying something new. Wise teachers use the classroom assessment process as an instructional intervention to teach the lesson that failure is acceptable at first, but that it cannot continue. Improvement must follow. Success is defined as continual improvement. To teach these lessons, we can use student involvement in the assessment, record-keeping, and communication processes.
In the case of student-involved classroom assessment, we open up the assessment development process and bring students in as partners. Under the careful management of teachers (who begin with a clear and appropriate vision of what they want their students to achieve), students are invited to play a role in defining the criteria by which their work will be judged. Then they apply those criteria to initial samples of their own work. This reveals to them where they are now in relation to where we want them to be. In short, we involve students in assessment to help them understand our vision of the meaning of their academic success. The result is classrooms in which there are no surprises and no excuses. This builds trust and confidence.
Student-involved record keeping brings students into the process of monitoring improvements in their performance through repeated self-assessment over time. One way to accomplish this is by having students build portfolios of evidence of their success over time and by requiring periodic student self-reflections about the changes they see. In effect, we use repeated student-involved classroom assessments to hold up a mirror that permits students to watch themselves grow. This can be a powerful confidence builder.
Student-involved communication brings students into the process of sharing information with others about their success. One way to do this is through the use of student-led parent conferences. I believe that this practice is the biggest breakthrough in communicating about student achievement in the last century. When students are well prepared over an extended period to tell the story of their own success (or lack thereof), they seem to experience a fundamental shift in their internal sense of responsibility for that success. The pride in accomplishment that students feel when they have a positive story to tell and tell it well can be immensely motivational. The sense of personal responsibility that they feel when anticipating what it will be like to face the music of having to tell their story of poor achievement can also drive them to productive work.
In these three ways, we can help students see, understand, and appreciate their own continuing journey toward achievement. We can help them perceive our expectations of them as less imposing. We can help them find and follow the path of success if they learn to do the orienteering themselves. This approach allows the learners to feel in charge of, rather than victimized by, the assessment process. It enables them to build the self-confidence they need to keep stepping off the edge into new learning adventures.
Understanding How to Motivate
From their very earliest school experiences, our students use the information we provide them through our classroom assessments to draw critical conclusions about themselves as learners. They decide whether they are capable of succeeding or not. They decide whether it is worth trying or not. They decide whether they should have confidence in themselves as learners and in us as teachers -- whether to risk investing in the schooling (and ultimately, the learning) experience.
In this sense, the relationship between assessment and student motivation is complex indeed. We should not be so naive as to believe that we can force our students to care merely by manipulating schedules of reinforcement and punishment. The downside risk is that such a simplistic system of motivation will become a game for our students -- breeding cynicism, not learning.
The alternative is to find ways to help students learn to respond to more than external motivation. We need to help them move to internal control -- to learn to take responsibility for their own academic success. Let me now detail the conditions that we must put in place to achieve this kind of positively motivating and constructively energizing assessment environment.
Make no mistake: there is much that we teachers must learn and do if we are to help students find the take-charge learners who reside within them. For instance, we must be crystal clear about the achievement targets we want our students to hit, so that we can reveal our expectations to them. We must know how to develop high-quality classroom assessments of various kinds, so that we can accurately determine whether they are succeeding. We must master the craft knowledge of student involvement in the assessment, record-keeping, and communication processes, if we are to help them see how to take control. We must understand the principles of effective communication about student achievement, and we must also know how to involve students productively in those processes.
Historically, neither teacher nor administrator training programs have provided their graduates with these important understandings. It will take a significant long-term national, state, and local professional development effort to enable educators to tap this wellspring of student motivation through the effective use of classroom assessment.
An Action Plan
I began with the contention that the time has come to redefine the relationship between assessment and effective schools. It is naive at best and dangerous to student well-being at worst to believe that we can maximize school effectiveness by inducing a fear of public censure for low standardized test scores. While this form of public accountability can motivate action for school improvement and so should not be eliminated, we must understand that merely raising anxiety levels as a means of raising test scores will be nonproductive. Ineffectiveness in schools most often arises not from a lack of effort but from a lack of expertise, time, and resources needed to increase student achievement. Simply administering a once-a-year standardized test by itself does nothing to change local capacity to achieve success.
Yet our collective assessment history has been to rely on standardized tests, layered one upon another. This pattern of behavior represents a manifestation of the mistaken belief on the part of policy makers that they control school quality. They do not. Students and teachers do.
As a supplementary strategy, I suggest the creation of a different kind of connection between assessment and student motivation. In this case, we use assessment not as a source of fear, stress, and anxiety but as a source of confidence. Through the use of student-involved classroom assessment, student-involved record keeping, and student-involved communication, we can let students feel in control of their own academic destiny. Perhaps we can keep at least some of them from giving up on themselves and their teachers. Perhaps we can retain and reenergize some students who are close to quitting.
There is compelling research evidence to support the contention that these student-involved uses of classroom assessment can give a big boost to standardized test scores. Everyone wins.
But there is a problem. We cannot count on classroom assessments to accurately reflect student achievement, nor can we rely on teachers to know how to use assessment in a student-centered way. These matters have not been part of their professional preparation.
The troubling paradox we face is that we have seen fit to spend literally billions since the 1940s to develop, administer, score, and report layer upon layer of standardized tests. But how much have we been willing to spend over that span of time in support of teachers as they face the challenges of classroom assessment? The deeply troubling answer is, essentially nothing.
The only acceptable remedy is the immediate implementation of national, state, and local programs of professional development designed to enhance the classroom assessment literacy of America's practicing educators -- from preschool through graduate school. We know what teachers need to know, and we know how to deliver that knowledge to them. All we need now is the will to deal with the problem. If we do so, major benefits will accrue to students, educators, and society.
But how does one go about developing the assessment literacy of 2.5 million teachers and the administrators who supervise their work? We have economically feasible and effective answers at our disposal.
As a critical first step, we must inform policy makers of the need for change, frankly admitting to the rampant assessment illiteracy within the current system. They must establish state licensing standards and local hiring and evaluation criteria that demand competence in assessment. This, in turn, will influence the standards of competence that will drive the training for teachers and administrators in higher education. If professors teach sound assessment practices as a matter of routine and model those practices in their own classroom assessments, then they will be able to attest to the assessment competence of those they train. As these assessment-literate newcomers begin to move throughout the system, the need for inservice training will abate.
Of course, we must simultaneously confront the immense challenge of providing professional development in assessment literacy for the many teachers who were deprived of relevant training early in their careers. Admittedly, the cost will be significant. But consider the cost to learners of the alternative. Moreover, some very economical professional development options are available.
Over the decades, we have fallen into the habit of thinking of professional development as workshops. In the case of developing assessment literacy, however, this training strategy will not work. To begin with, it is impractical. Too many educators have too much to learn. The cost of workshop time alone would be astronomical. What's more, we are beginning to feel the pinch of the pending national shortage of teachers in the fact that many districts cannot find enough substitutes to allow teachers to participate in workshops. Still further, a workshop format is too rigid to accommodate the diversity of learning styles and the hectic schedules of practicing educators. And to top it off, one simply cannot develop the depth of understanding needed to apply principles of sound classroom assessment by hearing someone talk about them in a workshop. Workshops do not permit the application of and experimentation with new assessment ideas in a real classroom setting. Productive adult learning requires learning about new ideas, experimenting with those ideas in one's own classroom, and sharing that experience with other colleagues in a team effort to internalize critical insights.
For all these reasons, I encourage reliance on learning teams or study groups for the development of assessment literacy. Small groups of teachers and administrators can band together to assume joint responsibility for building their own capacity to use assessment well. They don't need highly paid consultant/trainers to "show them the way." They need access to high-quality learning materials, and they need the time to learn from them. School districts across the country are already using learning teams to provide teachers with a chance to experiment with new assessment strategies in their classrooms and to share their successes and failures with their teammates. Each team member can track her or his own development as a confident, competent classroom assessor by building a portfolio (with self-reflections) for presentation to the team in the form of periodic "student-led conferences," in which the "students" are the teacher/learners. They can then make their best case that they have become competent, confident classroom assessors.
In short, we must develop the same kind of learning environment for adult learners that we advocate for students in the classroom -- an environment in which learners willingly take the lead. This strategy is affordable, effective, and essential if we seek to create effective schools.11 Even more important, it will help teachers use student-centered classroom assessment to unleash student motivation heretofore untapped in most classrooms. The result will be greater academic success.
