The Relative Equitability of High-Stakes Testing versus Teacher-Assigned Grades: An Analysis of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)

Abstract

Studies of cognition in education continue to suggest that learners acquire and internalize knowledge through social interaction with others. A term often used to describe this model of knowledge acquisition is inquiry, as in "inquiry-based learning." This model assumes that knowledge results from a process of constructing answers to questions about which learners are genuinely curious and in which they have some personal or professional investment. Two recent books from prominent literacy researchers illustrate the value of inquiry as an analytic approach to understanding how people learn about literacy. Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry, edited by Carol Lee and Peter Smagorinsky, expands upon and illustrates the theories of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky through analysis of literacy learning and literacy research in communities of practice. Inside City Schools: Investigating Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Elizabeth Radin Simons, Julie Shalhope Kalnin, Alex Casareno, and the M-CLASS teams (Multicultural Collaborative for Literacy and Secondary Schools), describes and analyzes the collaborative process by which a network of literacy teacherresearchers explores themes of cultural difference with their students, and how this process contributes to the teachers' professional knowledge. Though these two books discuss learners in different settings, they both support the argument that teachers themselves need to engage in sustained inquiry into their practice in order to support students' inquiry in the classroom. Both books do much to explain the value of inquiry in literacy research. At the same time, they illustrate the importance of literacy, and language, to meaningful inquiry. As Vygotsky (1962) proposed, written language mediates thought and scaffolds higher-order thinking processes such as reflection and analysis.Editor's Review of Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Researc.

Consistency of report card grades and external assessments in a Canadian province

“…Report card grades and scores on external assessments for the same subject correlate in the r=.40-.60 range (Ross and Gray 2008;Brennan et al 2001;D'Agostino and Bonner 2009;Entwisle and Alexander 1988;Leiter and Brown 1985;Martínez et al 2009). Higher correlations have been reported in sites where teachers rather than external examiners mark the tests (Lekholm and Cliffordson 2009) or teachers see the external results before submitting their own grades (Reeves et al 2001).…”

“…Marking severity varies among courses offered in the same school (Coe 2008) and even among students within the same class (Randall and Engelhard 2009). Teachers consider the motivational impact of grades, engaging in compensatory marking, with the result that racial minorities score higher on report cards than on external assessments (Brennan et al 2001;Martínez et al 2009). Although it could be argued that the discrepancy could be the result of item bias in the external assessment, designers of large scale tests are more likely than classroom teachers to search for and correct differential item functioning.…”

“…Which levels of report card grade signal that students are at-risk of low performance on state tests? These are the key questions of our study and no previous research has investigated them directly; i.e., there have been studies examining how well grades and tests match for the same period (Ross and Gray 2008;Brennan et al 2001;D'Agostino and Bonner 2009;Entwisle and Alexander 1988;Leiter and Brown 1985;Martínez et al 2009). But we found no research in which grades were used as a predictor of external assessment scores.…”

“…No systematic data on the alignment of teacher-assigned grades with curriculum is available in Ontario, despite the high interest in assessment alignment in other countries (Martone and Sireci 2009). Second, we had no direct measure of student engagement in school, a predictor of grades and tests but especially of grades (Brennan et al 2001;Martínez et al 2009;Randall and Engelhard 2009). Inclusion of this variable might reduce the unexplained variance in grade-test relationships.…”

Who plays? Who pays?: education finance policy that supplants tax burdens along lines of race and class

“…The institution of education remains not a democratizing institution but one that sustains social control and constrains opportunity for mobility (Lewis 2003). Contemporary problems of segregation (Orfield and Lee 2005), tracking (Lewis 2003), high stakes standardized testing (Brennan et al 2001), among many others, culminate in outcomes of disparity. How schools are financed is among another contributing factor, but most scholars have yet to study how the lottery supplements these other discriminatory mechanisms to maintain race and class inequality.…”