Barriers to Using High Quality Classroom Assessments

Barriers

Possible Solutions to Barriers

• Personal involvement with students/student issues: Our school is small and rebuild personal relationships with the students. Most of our students have issues of physical/emotional/substance abuse. It makes it difficult and to me an impartial assessor.

• The longer I've taught, the easier it is to recognize that I am not doing the students any favors by being overly kind to them. I am getting better at recognizing the role I must play in preparing them for post high school life.

• Student anger and mistrust: We spend so much time dealing with the affective and development of the students that lack of time and effective use of time become a huge issue. Most of our students have developed serious walls in their 10 years of public education.

• The solution to this problem is simply a matter of time, usually around six weeks, needed to overcome the student's fear and mistrust.  We continue to work on making this transition shorter and more successful.  To use Stiggin's phrase, the 'disposition' of the students is the first thing assessed.

• A repetition of students/inability to repeat same assessment: I am the only English teacher that our 57 students will have at our school. This means that I am only able to reuse curricula, a particular novel or unit, every few years. I have been teaching here for four years, which means that this year was the first year I was able to reuse a majority of previous lesson plans.

• The solution to this, that I've developed and continue to develop, is utilizing performance assessments primarily.  This way the structure may be the same as the student had two quarters before, but the content is different.  It is difficult to teach underlying knowledge needed for success when each class needs to be different.  The other part of this solution is simply teaching long enough to develop a variety of materials that are adaptable.

• More experience as a teacher/assessor: As I grow as a teacher and as an assessor, my skills in on-the-fly assessment increase as well as my ability to design high quality concrete assessment.

• The solutions here are taking courses, such as this one, as well as practicing the various types of assessments in my classroom. I'm always on the lookout for new and different ways of approaching assessment.

• Variety of student levels: Our school is nominally grades 10 through 12, but our skill levels in English range from fourth grade to college. This makes it very difficult to design assessments that will bridge this gap. At this point I rely primarily on essay work which can be assessed at the individuals level.

• One possible solution is to increase student body size so that we are better able to group similar skill levels.  Another partial solution is integrating computer-based instruction to fill in the gaps in their foundation knowledge.  The current solution is again an improvement in the teacher's ability to assess on individual basis.  Another solution is to teach students to critique each other.

• Dissatisfaction with accuracy of results: Because of all the external factors related to the student's personal lives, it is difficult to utilize standard assessments.

• The approach to a solution of this problem is going on at a school-wide level. We're trying to develop a culture in which testing and assessment truly is any measure of learning and not simply a piece of paper or a stamp it is required to move to the next level.