Achievement testing and assessment methods

Achievement Testing

Howell and Rueda in their article Achievement Testing with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students question the veracity of the widely used Standardized Norm-Referenced Achievement Test (SNAT) in measuring systematic differences among group means. As they point out, SNAT characteristics, are: completely nonaligned with instruction; assume a uniform curriculum, schooling, language proficiency and sociocultural experience across student groups; and are designed for an outside purpose of formulating education policy. Given the limitations of SNATs, Howell and Rueda explore the alternative Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) and the Performance Assessment (PA) approaches to student achievement. Though more aligned to classroom curriculum and instruction, these alternatives too have their limitations. The CBM focus on task-analytic decomposition of complex domains, for example, is of concern for teachers of language minority students who commonly use more holistic or 'whole-language' approaches. Similarly, the reliance of PA on the use of complex and interactive tasks is more likely to interact differentially across different student populations unless systematically controlled. By comparing different assessment approaches to achievement, Howell and Rueda conclude that ultimately the quality of any test is tied to the purpose for which it is used and to that extent, the use of SNATs to obtain an external, global perspective, which facilitates setting of school policy has its relevance in the absence of a better alternative.

A key point that Howell and Rueda make in their assessment of SNATs is the assumption of a uniform curriculum and schooling experience, which is unfair on culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. The validity of this hypothesis is reflected in the 1990s trend of school districts involved in desegregation planning shifting attention to within-school equity and integration in order to improve access to education and academic performance of minority students (Weiler, April 1998).