Alignment as a Teacher Variable

Abstract

With the exception of the procedures developed by Porter and colleagues (Porter, 2002), other methods of defining and measuring alignment are essentially limited to alignment between tests and standards. Porter's procedures have been generalized to investigating the alignment between content standards, tests, textbooks, and even classroom instruction as experienced by teachers and students. They have also led to the development of tools that hold promise for innovative uses in both research and the improvement of education practice. The purpose here is to define and illustrate innovative uses of two of the tools from Porter's work, content maps and a quantitative index of the degree of alignment. The intention is to put these tools in the hands of education researchers.With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001, the concept of alignment and how to measure alignment has taken center stage. The NCLB Act requires that states have challenging content standards for academic subjects and

The Quality of Content Analyses of State Student Achievement Tests and Content Standards

“…This study will extend Porter's earlier work by examining interrater reliability on the SEC across states, grade levels, and subjects. This may be particularly important because the SEC is the only content analysis tool that is not essentially limited to measuring alignment among tests and standards; it can also be used to measure alignment of instruction with either tests or content standards (Porter, Smithson, Blank, & Zeidner, 2007). Furthermore, this study employs generalizability theory to address the question of how many raters are needed to achieve reliable results, a result that has policy relevance for the states and agencies using the SEC as content analysis tools.…”

Developing and evaluating instructionally sensitive assessments in science

“…Cognitive complexity refers to the cognitive demands of the items. Most of the time, cognitive complexity has been determined using Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson et al, 2001), but other classification systems, such as Webb's (2005) depth of knowledge or Porter, Smithson, Blank, and Zeider's (2007) cognitive demands , can also be used. The Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS; Mullis et al, 2005) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA; Organisation for Economic Co‐Operation and Development, 2006) have their own frameworks of cognitive complexity.…”

Instructional Sensitivity as a Psychometric Property of Assessments

“…Instructional sensitivity is also closely related to two other prominent educational concepts. The first is instructional alignment (Porter, 2002; Porter, Smithson, Blank, & Zeidner, 2007), or the extent to which the content of instruction matches up with the content of standards, assessments, or other materials. While Porter and colleagues use alignment as a teacher variable, making it a useful tool for evaluating sensitivity, alignment is perhaps more prominently used to refer to content overlap between standards and assessments (Webb, 1999).…”

“…The methods include teacher self‐reports of the amount of focus and cognitive demand level (e.g., memorize, make connections) on a set of fine‐grained topics in a content taxonomy. The methods can be applied using taxonomies in English language arts and reading, mathematics, and science, and, combined with content analyses of assessments and standards using the same framework, can be used to compute indices of instructional alignment (Porter, 2002; Porter et al, 2007). These measures have been used to study the relationship between what is taught and what is tested.…”

“…The best strategies are to develop and use consistent measures of instruction and alignment across studies, so that results can be compared. While observations are limited by high costs in terms of time and expertise, teacher surveys of instructional coverage are low‐cost and reliable (Porter et al, 2007), though they focus on content only.…”