New Perspectives Can Be Gained

¶ … new perspectives can be gained from assessments, which are done in schools? What challenges do you face when using certain assessments?

Standardized assessments can give teachers a new perspective on the material that they are teaching in class. No matter how thorough a teacher's syllabus, he or she will often have a certain 'routine' and emphasis when presenting everything from basic skills (like teaching fractions) to more sophisticated skills such as analyzing a primary source document in a history class. Standardized assessments force students to use the skills and knowledge they have acquired and apply them in an unfamiliar context, in unexpected ways (Boud 2009). A good example of this can be found regarding the reading passages on the SAT, where students must read scholarly journal articles and answer specific questions about words, passages, and the overall meaning of the author. Many students do not encounter such higher-level secondary knowledge in their English classes, but they should be prepared to analyze and critically read outside sources and thus have the basic skills to cope with such articles.

Assessments also provide teachers with an idea of how their students measure up to a wider population of students (Atherton 2011). Teachers are well aware of additional challenges (or strengths) their pupils have that may affect overall results, but it is still helpful to contextualize such knowledge within a larger framework. Even if students living in challenged districts do not meet critical at-grade benchmarks, their ability to do so may have improved since the last time they were tested.

The idea of progression is another important aspect of assessment. It allows teachers and the school district to measure a student's progress over time, from grade to grade, rather than view it piecemeal, at the end of every test. Standardized assessments are thus a more meaningful measure of whether a school has 'failed' a student or not, or if the student ran into difficulties at a particular grade level. When viewing student progress in a holistic fashion, the district can also see if students of a certain demographic categories (such as ESL students or students with learning disabilities) tend to have more struggles than students with different demographic profiles.

Despite these potential benefits, many problems still exist regarding assessments. It is difficult to create a single, meaningful, reliable and valid form of assessment, many argue, that can measure the aptitude or achievement of students who are gifted as well as students who have learning disabilities. Assessments are often regarded in an oracular fashion, but they are only created by human beings. Their tests of knowledge may be imperfect, and students with teachers who 'teach to the tests' or who have a pedagogical style that tends to reflect a standardized assessment approach will have an advantage over students who have teachers that use more open-ended methods of grading within the classroom, like creative projects and portfolios. Assessments may also tend to favor students with certain learning styles, and discriminate against those who are visual or kinesthetic learners.