Education Week - April 2, 2014 - 30

An Interview With James W. Pellegrino on Assessment
Recently, Education Week Teacher's managing editor,
Anthony Rebora, talked with James W. Pellegrino, the
co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute
and a distinguished
professor of education at
the University of Illinois at
Chicago, about the future
of educational testing. Mr.
Pellegrino also serves on
the technical advisory committees of Smarter Balanced
and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Career (PARCC), the state consortia that are
developing assessments aligned to the Common Core
State Standards.
The following is an excerpt from the interview. To read
the full Q&A, go to www.edweek.org/go/Pellegrino.
Mr. Pellegrino will be a guest contributor to edweek.org's
time-limited opinion blog Assessing the Assessments.
To read the blog, go to www.edweek.org/go/Assessing
Assessments.
Anthony Rebora: Are there reasons for teachers to be
more positive about assessment in the near future?
James Pellegrino: Yes, I think that if you look at the
efforts of the two consortia to develop the assessments
that are aligned with the common core, what you see are
attempts to represent more complex kinds of thinking,
and reasoning, and performances. The simple fact that
both Smarter Balanced and PARCC have performance
tasks as a major part of their assessments is one indication
that they're trying to get at things that are represented
in the new standards that aren't easily measured
in typical selected-response type questions.
What is your impression of how those assessments are
playing out and how successful they'll be?
There's been a lot of good work on item development, but
there's still a lot of field testing that needs to be done
of the items and the tasks. In all honesty, I have to say
that what the consortia were asked to do in four years'
time was a pretty herculean task-to try and develop
assessments in grades 3-8 and high school in two subjects
aligned to new standards and do it in a way that
adequately got at the core concepts of what's supposed to
be mastered in the standards. So I think we'll find that
assessments are less than what some people might have
imagined was going to happen after four years of work.
But those were unrealistic expectations. ...I think the new
assessments will teach us a lot about building better assessments.
They're not going to be perfect, but hopefully
they will move us forward in a way that enables us to
more adequately measure student achievement and also
teaches what we still need to think about.
The report by the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment
in Education, in which you were involved, specifically
recommend[s] "new assessment resources and tools that
better integrate assessment with classroom teaching and
learning and better represent current thinking on how students
learn and on changes in the world at large." Any sense
of what that would look like for teachers in the classroom?
Well, in some ways, really good assessment of the type we're
thinking about doesn't look all that different from really good
instruction-or the kinds of tasks we would want students
to engage in the classroom as part of their learning. So there
tends to be a misconception that we're just talking about
building a bunch of new tests. What we're really talking about
is building tasks and situations in which students engage in
the kinds of thinking and reasoning we want them to do with
texts or mathematical solutions or scientific concepts-and
engage in them in ways where they have to grapple with the
key ideas. Some of this is about building better sets of tasks or
scenarios that teachers can use as part of their instructional
practice to help guide student learning. The tasks should
allow students to show what they understand and do not understand-and
therefore help the teachers enact formative
assessment practices. It's complicated because it means that
we in the assessment community have got to get much closer
to the world of curriculum and instruction.
Do you have any concerns about overtesting?
Oh, yeah! I think that in the United States, particularly
when it comes to large-scale testing, especially since No
Child Left Behind, we are testing too much. We test every
child every year in math and English/language arts, and
we're doing that because we like to get scores on every kid
so we can use those scores for all sorts of purposes, including
teacher accountability. We need to break out of that mindset-we
need to say, "Look, we do need to monitor how well
we're doing in educating our children and how well they're
learning but it doesn't necessarily mean that every kid, every
year has to be assessed using large-scale, high-stakes tests."
As I've been suggesting, a lot of what we want to know
about student learning could be gleaned from information
that could come out of the classroom. And if we want to
monitor the system as a whole we could use more effective
strategies like student sampling and matrix sampling
of tasks. There are ways to do it that are more efficient
to answer the kinds of questions that we want to
have answered as a society, without requiring every kid,
every year to take exactly the same test just so we ensure
that Johnny's score can be compared to Jimmy's score. n
In a Post-Literate Age
Education
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 36
we wrongly suggest that academics
can be boiled down to
mechanistic formulae.
In a post-literate world, the
late historian Eric Hobsbawm
suggested, the dominant feelings
are of information overload
and disconnectedness. A
pervasive sense exists that too
much is happening too fast to
understand. Hobsbawm described
this "eerie" sensation
in the early 1990s during the
Internet's infancy. He concluded
that "most young men
and women at the century's
end grow up in a sort of permanent
present lacking any
organic relation to the public
past of the times they live in."
I believe such disconnect and
overwhelm form a byproduct
of the turn away from books.
Among counterarguments
hailing the information age
as a revolution in personal
enlightenment, the education
researcher Sugata Mitra
articulates perhaps the most
sweeping variant. In a TED
talk, Mitra discusses providing
students with technology
(laptops, the Internet, "the
cloud") to "teach themselves."
He sees schools as props for
a "bureaucratic administrative
machine," itself a byproduct
of Western imperialism.
I applaud Mitra's boldness
and am certainly no fan of
imperialism. Yet there exists
troubling, long-term evidence
showing that young people
who most readily access these
new technologies become less
independent. Today's young
Americans are, in the words
of Steven Mintz, a historian
of the family and children,
"isolate[d] and juvenilize[d] ...
more than ever."
Post-literate schooling does
isolate students from narrative
structures conveying meaning.
It also juvenilizes via technologies
that oversimplify and
denigrate analysis. Such tools
contribute to overwhelm and
disconnect: Kids drown in data
bereft of higher logic.
I have responded by as-
signing more books, selected
for interest. I coach students
away from taking bulleted,
fragmented notes and insist
they articulate higher meanings
from our subject matter. I
invite authors to the classroom
to discuss their work. I bring
boxes of books from my home
and town libraries to assist research.
I challenge kids' use of
technology and sweat my own.
Still, I remain unsure whether
such tactics do anything even
to delay a post-literate future
beyond my control. n
LETTERS to
the EDITOR
Gender-Neutral Restrooms
Best for Transgender Students
To the Editor:
What is the first word that comes to mind when you
envision America? Happiness? Equality? What about
the word contradictory? A nation where "all men
are created equal" is filled with racism, sexism, and
homophobia.
While it is refreshing to see California encourage
equivalence for transgender students through
Assembly Bill 1266, which took effect in the Golden
State on Jan. 1, the new law is not the solution.
AB 1266 requires schools to respect students' gender
identity, including their right to choose the restroom
that matches that identity ("Calif. Transgender Law
Takes Effect in Schools, Amid Efforts to Repeal It,"
Jan. 22, 2014).
However, allowing students to choose which
restroom to use could potentially put these students
at a higher risk of victimization, since there is no
faculty supervision in restrooms. Alternatively, there
is a safer measure that can be taken to help these
students.
With the introduction of additional gender-neutral
restrooms and adoption of stricter punishments
for those who terrorize their transgender peers,
transgender students will feel safer than in the milieu
created by the legislation. This in turn will generate
a productive learning environment for all staff and
students.
Amy Fariello
Philadelphia, Pa.
COMMENTARY POLICY
Education Week takes no editorial positions, but publishes
opinion essays and letters from outside contributors in its
Commentary section. For information about submitting an
essay or letter for review, visit
www.edweek.org/go/guidelines.
Letters should be as brief as possible,
with a maximum length of 350 words.
30 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 2, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
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YOU THINK?
Write a letter to the editor!
Cari Vander Yacht for Education Week
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