Making Classroom Assessments Reliable and Valid. Robert J. Marzano

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      introduction

      The Role of Classroom Assessment

      Classroom assessment has been largely ignored in the research and practice of assessment theory. This is not to say that it has been inconsequential to classroom practice. To the contrary, the topic of classroom assessment has become more and more popular in the practitioner literature. For example, the book Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know is in its eighth edition (Popham, 2017). Many other publishers continue to release books on the topic. This trend notwithstanding, technical literature in the 20th century has rarely mentioned classroom assessment. As James McMillan (2013b) notes:

      Throughout most of the 20th century, the research on assessment in education focused on the role of standardized testing …. It was clear that the professional educational measurement community was concerned with the role of standardized testing, both from a large-scale assessment perspective as well as with how teachers used test data for instruction in their own classrooms. (p. 4)

      As evidence, McMillan (2013b) notes that an entire issue of the Journal of Educational Measurement that purported to focus on state-of-the-art testing and instruction did not address teacher-made tests. Additionally, the first three editions of Educational Measurement (Lindquist, 1951; Linn, 1993; Thorndike, 1971)—which are designed to summarize the state of the art in measurement research, theory, and practice—paid little if any attention to classroom assessment. Finally, both editions of The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association [AERA], American Psychological Association [APA], & National Council on Measurement in Education [NCME], 1999, 2014)—which, as their titles indicate, are designed to set standards for testing in both psychology and education—made little explicit reference to classroom assessment. It wasn’t until the fourth edition in the first decade of the 21st century (Brennan, 2006) that a chapter was included addressing classroom assessment.

      Most recently, the SAGE Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment made a stand for the rightful place of classroom assessment: “This book is based on a single assertion: Classroom assessment (CA) is the most powerful type of measurement in education that influences student learning” (McMillan, 2013a, p. xxiii). Throughout this text, I take the same perspective. I also use the convention of referring to classroom assessment as CA. Since the publication of the SAGE Handbook, this abbreviation is now the norm in many technical discussions of classroom assessment theory. My intent is for this book to be both technical and practical.

      What, then, is the place of CAs in the current K–12 system of assessment, and what is their future? This resource attempts to lay out a future for CA that will render it the primary source of evidence regarding student learning; this would stand in stark contrast to the current situation in which formal measurements of students are left to interim assessments, end-of-course assessments, and state assessments. In this introduction, I will discuss several topics with regard to CAs.

      ■ The curious history of large-scale assessments

      ■ The place of classroom assessment

      ■ Reliability and validity at the heart of the matter

      ■ The need for new paradigms

      ■ The large-scale assessment paradigm for reliability

      ■ The new CA paradigm for reliability

      ■ The large-scale assessment paradigm for validity

      ■ The new CA paradigm for validity

      Before delving directly into the future of CA, it is useful to consider the general history of large-scale assessments in U.S. education since it is the foundation of current practices in CA.

The Curious History of Large-Scale Assessments

      The present and future of CA are intimately tied to the past and present of large-scale assessments. In 2001, educational measurement expert Robert Linn published “A Century of Standardized Testing: Controversies and Pendulum Swings.” Linn notes that the original purpose of large-scale assessment was comparison and began in the 19th century.

      Educators commonly refer to J. M. Rice as the inventor of the comparative large-scale assessment. This assignment is based on his 1895 assessment of the spelling ability of some thirty-three thousand students in grades 4 through 12 for which comparative results were reported (Engelhart & Thomas, 1966). However, assessments that educators administered to several hundred students in seventeen schools in Boston and one school in Roxbury in 1845 predated this comparative large-scale assessment. Because of this, Horace Mann (who initiated the effort) deserves credit as the first to administer large-scale tests. Lorrie A. Shepard (2008) elaborates on the contribution of Horace Mann, noting:

      In 1845, Massachusetts State Superintendent of Instruction, Horace Mann, pressured Boston school trustees to adopt written examinations because large increases in enrollments made oral exams unfeasible. Long before IQ tests, these examinations were used to classify pupils … and to put comparative information about how schools were doing in the hands of state-level authority. (p. 25)

      Educators designed these early large-scale assessments to help solve perceived problems within the K–12 system. For example, in 1909, Leonard P. Ayres published the book Laggards in Our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination in City School Systems. Despite the book’s lack of sensitivity to labeling large groups of students in unflattering ways, it brought attention to the problems associated with repeated retention of students in grade levels. This helped buttress the goal of reformers who wanted to develop programs that would mitigate failure.

      The first half of the 20th century was not a flattering era for large-scale assessments. They focused on natural intelligence, and educators used them to classify examinees. To say the least, this era did not represent the initial or current intent of large-scale assessment. I address this period in more detail shortly.

      By the second half of the 20th century, educators began to use large-scale assessments more effectively. Such assessments were a central component of James Bryant Conant’s (1953) vision of schools designed to provide students with guidance as to appropriate career paths and support in realizing related careers.

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