Educational Assessment for the Elementary and Middle School Classroom

Two decades ago the National Commission on Excellence in Education published a report critical of American schools titledA Nation at Risk(National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). That report cataloged some of our schools' failures, one of which was an inability to teach children how to think critically and apply what they have learned. Other reports followed, providing the impetus for educational reform that continues today. The essence of these reform movements has been an attempt to have teachers teach based on the way the learner's mind works rather than on traditional views of learning that reflect solely a "mechanical" or behavioral view of human competence. In the last two decades teaching and learning have changed considerably, replacing a more mechanistic "drill and practice" view of learning with one that could embrace the excitement, thirst, and motivation for learning that all children start out with in life. These changes have led to a new view of learning and assessment in which learners are provided the opportunity to construct their own sense of what is being learned by building connections or relationships among the ideas and facts being taught. Philosophy of This Text This new view of learning and assessment (Bruer, 1993) derives from nearly three decades of research by cognitive scientists. From studies of how the mind works, these scientists have accumulated a wealth of information about how learners become proficient in knowledge domains such as reading, language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics. Today learning is seen as an active process by which learners construct "knowledge structures" or "mental representations." They not only construct these structures when teachers teach subject matter content, but they also construct the strategies needed for thinking about information and ways to become consciously aware of and improve the use of these strategies. When teachers assess learning today, they can no longer simply test for knowledge with objective-type formats. Those tests, when taken alone, support a model of knowledge as collections of bits of information demanding fast responses in which the task is to find the correct answer rather than to engage in interpretation, critical thinking, and problem solving. Today, teachers must have a broader menu of tools to assess how a learner organizes new information, the strategies that a learner employs while doing this, and the metacognitive skills that a learner uses while consciously employing learning strategies. Thus, a new technology of classroom assessment has arisen alongside traditional assessment methods. This book is an attempt to give the elementary and middle school teacher a comprehensive menu of assessment techniques for assessing not only what learners know, but also how they think, perform, and apply what they know in authentic, real-world contexts. This text is a gateway--a bridge between the old and the new. It provides the beginning teacher with a foundation of not only how to assess a learner's knowledge base with traditional objective-type tests and essays, but also how to assess a learner's declarative and procedural knowledge, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, skill in transferring knowledge to new contexts, and habits of mind by observing and recording what their learners actually can do when performing in authentic ways within the natural ongoing context of the classroom. Organization of This Text With this goal in mind, we have woven a number of themes throughout the fabric of this book, making it unique and timely to new instructional methods and assessment techniques. These themes are Motivation for learning and doing well in school occurs when assessments are learning experiences. The skills that are assessed should be the skills that are practiced in class and required in subsequent learning. Students bBorich, Gary D. is the author of 'Educational Assessment for the Elementary and Middle School Classroom', published 2003 under ISBN 9780130947895 and ISBN 013094789X.