book name is
Popham, W. J. (2014). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (7th ed.) Pearson.
The question: Should classroom or student assessment be tied to teacher evaluation or to salary? Why or Why Not?
This information can help you to answer this question.
I need 200 word at lest to answer.
It is because they enjoy what they do that they waded through a medley of
preservice teacher education courses, conquered the challenges of student teaching,
and hopped the myriad hurdles of the certification process. Teachers overcame
these obstacles in order to earn annual salaries that, particularly during the first few
years, are laughably low. Yes, there’s little doubt that teachers enjoy teaching.
Although teachers like to teach, they rarely like to test. Yet, here you are—
beginning a book about testing. How can I, the author, ever entice you, the reader,
to become interested in testing when your heart has already been given to teaching?
The answer is really quite straightforward. Teachers who can test well will be
better teachers. Effective testing will enhance a teacher’s instructional effectiveness.
Really!
how their school or district stacked up in comparison to other schools or districts
in the state. Districts and schools were ranked from top to bottom.
From a news perspective, the publishing of test results was a genuine coup.
The test scores were inexpensive to obtain, and readers were really interested in the
scores. Residents of low-ranked districts could complain; residents of high-ranked
districts could crow. More importantly, because there are no other handy indices of
educational effectiveness around, test results became the measuring-stick by which
citizens reached conclusions about how well their schools were doing. There are
many reports of realtors trying to peddle homes to prospective buyers on the basis
that a house was located “in a school district with excellent test scores.”
Let me be as clear as I can possibly be about this issue, because I think it is a
terrifically important one. As matters stand, students’ performances on a state’s accountability
tests are certain to influence the way that all teachers are evaluated—
even if a particular teacher’s own students never come near an accountability test.
Here’s how that will happen.
Suppose you teach ninth-grade social studies, and your ninth-graders aren’t
required to take federally required accountability test. Suppose you’re a secondgrade
teacher, and your students aren’t required to take any kind of accountability
test. Suppose you’re a high school teacher who teaches subjects and grade levels
where no federally imposed accountability tests are required. In all these “suppose”
situations, your students won’t be taking accountability exams. However,
the public’s perception of your personal effectiveness will most certainly be influenced
by the scores of your school’s students on any accountability tests that are
required for such schools. Let’s be honest—Do you want to be a teacher in a “failing”
school? Do you want your students’ parents to regard you as ineffective because
you do your teaching in what’s thought to be a sub-par school? I doubt it.
The reality is that the performance of any school’s students on federally stipulated
accountability tests will splash over on every teacher in that school. If you
teach in a school that’s regarded as successful, then you will be seen as a member
of an effective educational team. The opposite is also true. Unless federal account-
Today’s Reasons for Teachers to Know about Assessment
■ Test results determine public perceptions of educational effectiveness.
■ Students’ assessment performances are increasingly seen as part of the
teacher evaluation process.
■ As clarifiers of instructional intentions, assessment devices can improve instructional
quality.
These reasons are also linked to decisions. For instance, when citizens use
test results to reach judgments about a school district’s effectiveness, those judgments
can play a major role in determining what level of taxpayer support will be
provided in that district. There are also decisions on the line when students’ test
scores are used as evidence to evaluate teachers. Such decisions as whether the
teacher should be granted tenure or receive merit-pay awards are illustrative of the
kinds of decisions that can ride, at least in part, on the results of educational assessments.
In this first chapter, the emphasis was on why teachers really need to know about
assessment. Early in the chapter, the assessment-related features of various reauthorizations
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 were briefly
described because this oft-revised federal law’s impact on most teachers’ instructional
and assessment decisions is becoming profound. Educational assessment
was defined as a formal attempt to determine students’ status with respect to eduPearson
Learning Solutions Not For Resale
Or
Distribution
cational variables of interest. Much of the chapter was devoted to a consideration
of why teachers must become knowledgeable regarding educational assessment.
Based on teachers’ classroom activities, four traditional reasons were given for
why teachers assess—namely, to (1) diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses,
(2) monitor students’ progress, (3) assign grades, and (4) determine a teacher’s
own instructional effectiveness. Based on recent uses of educational assessment results,
The idea of “pay for performance,” which involves supplementing teacher pay or providing bonuses based on student test scores, is one of the latest educational fads to sweep the country.
Research and experience, however, indicate that such schemes are more likely to damage our children’s education than to improve it. As one analyst notes, “test-based pay is more useful politically than it is effective educationally.”
Performance pay will not improve teaching or learning
Research shows that the carrot of higher pay does not lead to better results. In an authoritative studyconducted at Vanderbilt University, for example, teachers who were offered bonuses for improving student test results produced no more improvement than the control group.
Similar studies of teacher merit pay have shown null results in New York City and Chicago. Because of the lack of positive results, a number of pay for performance programs have been abandoned, including programs in New York City and California.
Methods that use test scores to evaluate teachers, including the currently popular “value added” calculations, have also proved highly unreliable. The National Academy of Sciences and experts assembled by the Economic Policy Institute have warned of the potentially damaging consequences of implementing test-based evaluation systems or merit pay based on test scores.
- To evaluate teachers by considering the changes in their students’ test scores. As I explained in the book, and if we appreciate improvements in student performance, we must judge teachers through their students’ grades.
