Academic Assessment: Five Themes for the Future
Throughout my research, teaching, and thought leadership, I think about accessibility from a systems perspective. Where are the barriers to equity and access in education and employment? And how can we dismantle them?
My professional experiences have long been shaped by educational assessment as an anchor. Educational assessment was the entry point for my own professional development, my dissertation, the first research laboratories I led for graduate students, and my teaching responsibilities within the School Psychology Training program at The University of Texas at Austin.
My academic assessment journey
Over the years, I had the honor to serve on many assessment advisory task forces, bringing my unique skill set and perspectives to often deep and complex discussions about how to improve assessment systems from the ground up. These experiences have been invaluable in shaping my perspectives on educational assessment, as well as my contributions to their development and implementation.
And yet I come to assessment by a nontraditional route. My background is in human development, with an emphasis on language development. My earliest research looked at differential developmental pathways for deaf and disabled students, with parallel applications to what was then referred to as English Language Learners (now multilingual learners). While I am not a psychometrician by trade, I am a colleague whose work in assessment accessibility goes hand in hand with measurement research and application.
What is the future of academic assessment?
One-size does not fit all, and in that, we are continually challenged to revisit our assumptions about best practices in test construction, reliability, validity in score use, and translation into meaningful learning experiences for all students.
As I reflect on my 20 years in the field, particularly from a systemic lens, these five themes are shaping my vision of the future of academic assessment.
1. Assessment data as support for quality instruction
The alignment between instruction and assessment is essential for a valid and inclusive assessment system, and yet is sometimes sticky and hard to achieve. A weak connection between the two results in a similarly weak interpretation of what a test score represents about student learning.
Issues related to “teaching to the test” and uneven “opportunity to learn” are still deep equity concerns in how we understand the relationship between what is measured and its effect on instruction.
Strengthening assessment to center its constructs on the outcomes of teaching and student learning is critical as we move forward with future assessment system development. Clear articulation of content standards is a foundational part of this link, but only the beginning. The relationship between standards and teaching is bidirectional – standards setting that includes teacher perspectives on how students learn must feed back into the way standards are sequenced and described. This articulation needs to be situated within not just the curriculum, but also the pedagogical choices that teachers make so that they make sense for a diverse student body.
Through-year assessments are increasingly the focus of how the interim, formative assessments are linked to the summative end-of-year testing. It may be possible to have a fully comprehensive system where students take blocks of test items throughout the year, instead of waiting for the end of the year to test intensively across a multi-day period.
2. Secure online delivery systems
At a fundamental operational level, the essential move to online platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic raised a number of key questions for the delivery of academic assessment: What is possible? What is secure? What is fair?
Online access also added to the harsh reality of unequal distribution of resources in home environments. School districts scrambled to deliver a broad array of laptops and notebooks to students across their service area. School buses were literally sitting in parking lots to provide wifi connections for students.
Above and beyond the logistic challenges of bringing online test delivery was the question of how to think proactively about the accessibility of the assessment experience for our diverse student populations. Online assessment requirements are complex and can include:
Curriculum based assessments that teachers use to measure student learning
Accommodation delivery for eligible students in the standardized assessment platforms
Alternate assessments, such as for students with significant cognitive disabilities
Screeners for multilingual students who might be eligible for English Language support services
Ensuring that the full range of student assessment can occur online was a major task within the pandemic. Even the NAEP assessment is soon going to be accessible via multiple online devices. Going forward, ensuring that these online delivery systems are able to be administered securely, and reliably, will continue to be a priority for test infrastructure, procedures, and policy.
3. Partnership with families and communities
Public schools are an integral part of the local community, and yet there is often a disconnect between families and schools. This is particularly true for families from marginalized populations, who often do not see people from their own communities represented in the teaching staff and administration of our school systems.
Furthering this disconnect is the idea that testing is sometimes seen as a necessary evil, or even something that takes undue time away from instruction. This is particularly true for summative, end-of-year standardized assessments, where scores are rarely available to inform instruction within the same school year. Understanding this prevailing view is critical in thinking about how to engage with families, including those with multilingual and disabled children.
Clear, jargon-free, and transparent communications are central to bridging the assessment divide between schools and families. From initial conversations about the purpose and benefits of assessment to the format and tone of resultant score reports, there are many things that schools and their assessment vendors need to rethink in how they disseminate and share information about testing and what scores mean about a student’s academic journey.
4. Robust and efficient assessment systems across the lifespan
The core of most K-12 academic assessment systems are on the standards based content areas in early elementary through high school grades. And yet we know that academic learning, particularly language, goes hand in hand with identity, cognitive, socio-emotional, family, and cultural factors.
The extent to which academic learning and language can be measured in conjunction with these contextual factors may be a game-changer in terms of understanding not just the WHAT of language learning, but the HOW and WHY.
This approach fits particularly well within the frame of asset-based assessment for multilingual and disabled learners. Potential emerging assessments branch out from the core of language and academic achievement measures, such as robust early childhood measures of kindergarten readiness, measures at different points of transition for early, mid, and late adolescents. These can integrate linguistic aspects of postsecondary planning and navigating college and employment settings.
5. Emerging (and borrowed) trends
From a practical operational standpoint, the trends of “badging” and “microcredentialling” have a place in academic assessment.
Gamification of learning pathways and measures is not new, but has yet to be readily applied into the K-12 and postsecondary learning environments.
The extent to which these approaches can be suitably applied to students — much as they are to career professionals — may help move academic assessment systems towards what we see as high-impact and high-engagement strategies for longitudinal and developmentally oriented models of learning and achievement.
Our students are diverse digital natives who are experiencing a world unlike any we have ever known before. We must ensure our academic assessments are moving toward the same future they are.