Counterpoint: Much ado about something (though we're not sure it's our article): A reply to Howell and Evans.

In our article "Must Instructionally Useful Performance Assessment Be Based in the Curriculum?" (Fuchs & Deno, 1994), we raised the question of whether instructionally relevant assessment of student performance must be based in the curriculum materials that teachers use to conduct their daily lessons. As Howell and Evans (this issue) acknowledged in their "comment," we framed this question quite explicitly within the context of the curriculum materials used for instruction. At the same time, Howell and Evans asserted that our article "provides a useful footing for examining a seemingly unambiguous issue: the definition of curriculum." We believe that by raising their issue, in response to our article, Howell and Evans ignored our operational definition of curriculum and created a "red herring" that distracts readers from our thesis. Moreover, as Howell and Evans's own commentary makes clear, the definition of curriculum is not "seemingly unambiguous," and we are no more" interested in engaging in arguments about the meaning of curriculum than biologists are in debating the meaning of the term living (cf. Stanovich, 1992). Discussions of what terms "really mean" are the essentialist arguments of philosophers, and we agree with Stanovich that advances in our field require clarity in operational rather than essential definitions. Essentialist debate, rather than empirical research about the "real meaning" of constructs in our field, has resulted in little real advance in our knowledge of how to overcome the problems confronted by our clients (consider debates over the "truly learning disabled," for example). We stated in our article that "we use the word curriculum to denote the materials in which instruction occurs, not the goals, objectives or outcomes inherent in school curricula." By doing so, we made clear that we understand the essentialist distinctions that concern Howell and Evans. We chose to be explicit about how we were using the term curriculum, because practitioner use of the term is at odds with Howell and Evans's dictionary definition and because we wanted our readers to understand clearly and specifically what we were addressing in our article. In our efforts to advance the empirical knowledge base regarding performance assessment, we have assumed that it is important to be operationally clear regarding our knowledge claims so that others can check the validity of our conclusions. We note that Howell and Evans did not choose to ask why we would examine whether instructionally relevant assessment must be rooted in the materials of instruction. The reason, we suspect, is that they have learned, as we have, that for most teachers the materials of instruction are what defines the curriculum. Our concern is that too many teachers feel constrained to teach using only the materials purchased by the schools and that teachers may further believe the assessment must be wedded to the materials of instruction. Indeed, as we have moved to recommend assessment approaches that focus on generalized outcomes independent of specific instructional materials (Fuchs & Deno, 1991), school personnel have often asked us whether we are abandoning the "curriculum. …