A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Assessment of Students Performance April 1997

EXHIBIT 6-2

Levels of Teacher Appropriation of Assessment Technologies

High Level of Appropriation — Teachers use an assessment technology, or their own modified version of it, regularly. Alternatively, especially in the case of assessments developed outside the school building, teachers have modeled some of their in-class assessments on an assessment technology. Teachers value the information the assessment provides about their students' learning or their own teaching, and they use this information in one or more of a variety of ways, such as monitoring student progress and obtaining instructional feedback. These teachers also have typically modified some of their teaching practices to place greater emphasis on the types of skills and competencies emphasized by the assessment.

Example — Teachers at Ni?os Bonitos Elementary School have developed and fully appropriated a system of performance-based assessment in language arts that is thoroughly integrated with instruction. Teachers develop tasks for assessing students' emerging language skills, and they judge students' achievement on these tasks using generic language arts rubrics tailored to reflect achievement at different stages of English language learning. Children's growth is further monitored through the compilation of a language arts portfolio (which is stored electronically as well as in original paper form). All teachers in the school use the language arts rubrics and portfolios to assess their students' achievement, and they insist that the information they collect is vital to their ability to understand and plan for individual students' learning.

Moderate Level of Appropriation — Teachers may occasionally use a new assessment technology, but they are not yet clear on how it fits into their instructional system. Alternatively, teachers may value the information provided by an assessment introduced from outside the school but still not model their own in-class assessments to resemble the new assessment technology. In general, teachers who have moderately appropriated an assessment are open-minded about its utility but remain uncertain about how they can best use it (sometimes because of a dearth of models available to help teachers learn how to incorporate new instructional and assessment techniques into their classrooms).

Example — Teachers at McGary Elementary School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, have moderately appropriated their district's performance-based literacy assessments. Teachers use the assessment tasks, as they are required to do by the district, and they are beginning to modify their instructional techniques (e.g., providing more cooperative learning activities) in response to their increased understanding of how to assess student achievement. However, teachers are less clear on how they should interpret the information about students' learning generated by the district's assessment tasks, and they apparently are not modeling their own assessments after the district-developed tasks. In sum, teachers are beginning to identify value in the district's assessments but have not yet fully made them a model for classroom assessment practice.

Low Level of Appropriation — Teachers do not use an assessment technology, or they use it only when required to do so. They do not value the information generated by the assessment, and they have not modeled their own assessment practices on it or modified their instructional practices to any appreciable degree.

Example — Teachers at Manzanita High School in Arizona have not appropriated the state's system of performance assessment at all. Though they devote one to two weeks of class time to preparing students for the ASAP, they see this as lost time C time that could be better spent teaching other material. Teachers also say that the information that ASAP provides about their students is not valuable (some also suggest it is misleading), and they do not base their classroom assessment practices upon the state's model.