DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TEACHER-BASED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TEACHER-BASED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Introduction For teachers to judge the attainments of their own students has been widely acknowledged as offering a potentially more dependable basis for summative assessments of student performance. Teachers’ ability to draw on evidence from numerous events within a student’s learning programme should, at least in principle, ensure that teacher judgments of such evidence will more accurately reflect student performance than would evidence from external tests and examinations. The case for teacher judgment to contribute to summative assessments has been succinctly made as: …teachers can sample the range of a pupil’s work more fully than can any assessment instruments by an agency external to the school. This enhances both reliability (because it provides more evidence than is available through externally devised assessment instruments) and validity (it provides a wider range of evidence). (Mansell, James, et.al., 2009) This argument has fuelled the case for performance assessments in the USA (Resnick & Resnick, 1992), for assessment by teachers in high school qualifications in the UK (Wilmut, 2004), and for reliance on teacher judgment in school-based assessment at the end of secondary school in Queensland, Australia (Maxwell, 2010). Harlen (2005) has reviewed the research evidence on the reliability of teachers’ assessments for summative purposes, leading her to conclude that:

When steps are taken to moderate the results, the reliability of teachers’ judgments is comparable to that of tests. (Harlen, 2011)

What form should a system in which teacher judgment has a role take? In summative assessment systems that rely on evidence from tests and examinations much attention is focussed on test items, the responses to which will be the basis for conclusions about student performance. In systems where teacher judgment has a role the main focus of attention has usually been on how such judgments can be consistent when they are arrived at by a large number of teachers using diverse sources of evidence obtained in circumstances that are less constrained than test papers taken under examination conditions. And yet both the student responses to tasks set during a programme and their responses to items in a time-limited test are in fact key points within an assessment process that begins with the design of a course programme and ends, for summative purposes, with the reporting of an overall measure of performance for each student following the programme. To focus only on the admittedly key point in the process where evidence is elicited and initial judgments are made is to overlook the fact such a process, whether teacher-based or test-based, needs to be structured in such a way as to maximise validity and reliability. The structure of a test-based process is not always open to public view but anyone familiar with the work of testing agencies will be aware that there is a series of critical stages in that process, first to develop a set of appropriate test items and then to ensure that student responses are judged in ways that control for variations in assessor judgment. What appears to be less widely recognised is that if a system based on teacher judgment is to be credible it will require equivalent structures. This paper will start by attempting first to identify the stages that need to be built in to a system of teacher-based summative assessment. It will then move on to explain and discuss how two such systems are being developed in Wales to assess students at the ages of 11 and 14. It will conclude by arguing that unless systems of teacher-based assessment are designed, implemented and supported by a suitable infrastructure they are unlikely to command the confidence of students, teachers or the wider public.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TEACHER-BASED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

Chapters: 1 - 5
Delivery: Email

Number of Pages: 75

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