Measuring Classroom Assessment with a Work Sample
Author: Beesley, Andrea
Date: 2009-04-15
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Feedback (Response),Student Evaluation,Work Sample Tests,Grade 5,Methods,Teaching Methods,Academic Achievement,Grade 4,Elementary Education,Data Collection,Control Groups,Elementary School Mathematics,Intervention,Professional Development,Scoring Rubrics,Formative Evaluation

Background: To attain accurate information about student performance, teachers must apply sound classroom assessment practices. First, teachers need to be able to understand and identify the purpose of their assessments. Teachers also need to provide their students with clear learning targets, in language that students can easily understand, so students comprehend the goals. Teachers also need to understand the different types of learning targets so that appropriate assessment methods can be used to collect accurate information, and then must provide descriptive feedback to students. Purpose: This paper describes the use of a teacher work sample used as a measure of teacher practice of classroom assessment in elementary mathematics, and describes the approach to using an expert panel to identify anchor papers. Study Sample: Sixty-two schools in a Mountain West state with a total of 317 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers are participating in the study. Intervention: Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (Stiggins et al., 2004). Research Design: Experimental. Control or Comparison Condition: Usual teacher professional development. Data Collection and Analysis: The work sample, used as an outcome measure of teacher practice of classroom assessment, was collected from teachers at baseline. From those papers, the researchers identified potential anchor and qualifying paper candidates. They then assembled a five-person expert panel to review the accompanying rubric, score some papers together as a panel, and then score other papers to be used as training and qualifying papers, so that scorers could be trained to accurately score the work samples collected at the end of the study. Findings: The panelists made changes to the rubric considered to be necessary to score the papers. The papers scored by all panelists, requiring four out of five identical scores for immediate agreement, showed a relatively low level of immediate agreement; the feedback rubric dimensions had the highest levels of immediate agreement. The papers scored by three out of five panelists, requiring two out of three identical scores for immediate agreement (a less stringent criterion), showed greater immediate agreement. Overall the mean of the scores was 2.15 (SD = 0.61), indicating a fairly low level of ratings on the four-point rubric in this baseline sample. The lowest-scoring dimensions were the two feedback dimensions, with means of 1.67 and 1.62. Conclusion: After using the rubric with the work samples, the panel was able to achieve, with experience, acceptable levels of agreement and scored 21 anchor papers. The teacher work sample can provide a window into teacher practice of classroom assessment. Citation: Beesley, A. D. (2009, April). Measuring teacher practice of classroom assessment with a work sample.  Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA. (Contains 1 table.)