Instructors Manual and Test Bank

Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank

for Classroom Assessment What Teachers Need to Know Ninth Edition W.James Popham (Answers At The End) 1 / 4

i Table of Contents Chapter 1 Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment? 1 Chapter 2 Deciding What to Assess 6 Chapter 3 Reliability of Assessment 21 Chapter 4 Validity 24 Chapter 5 Fairness 28 Chapter 6 Selected-Response Tests 32 Chapter 7 Constructed-Response Tests 34 Chapter 8 Performance Assessment 36 Chapter 9 Portfolio Assessment 39 Chapter 10 Affective Assessment 41 Chapter 11 Improving Teacher-Developed Assessments 44 Chapter 12 Formative Assessment 47 Chapter 13 Making Sense Out of Standardized Test Scores 50 Chapter 14 Appropriate and Inappropriate Test-Preparation Practices 52 Chapter 15 The Evaluation of Instruction 55 Chapter 16 Assessment-Based Grading Mid-Course Examination 58 60 Final Examination 66 Answer Keys and Item-Chapter Concordance 77 Distance-Learning Possibilities 78 2 / 4

Chapter 1: Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment?

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CHAPTER 1

WHY DO TEACHERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ASSESSMENT?

Instructor to Instructor

Firing Up the Troops

If you’re teaching a classroom-assessment course, whether your students are prospective teachers or experienced classroom teachers, you’ll almost certainly need to do at least some sort of motivational job to get your students to approach the course with suitable zeal.

More often than not, at least in my experience, most students take courses because they are required to do so. Teacher education students typically enroll in a classroom-assessment course either because it is a licensure requirement or because the student’s advisor urged the course be taken. Experienced teachers might sign up for a classroom assessment course as part of a degree program or, increasingly, because officials of a school district have decided the district’s educators need a dose of classroom assessment. Teachers who are directed to take a course, even though it might be billed as a professional development course, are rarely jubilant about that obligatory prospect. Having taught such indifferent, reluctant, or sometimes hostile teachers, I know.

At any rate, I encourage you not to assume your students are breathlessly waiting to gobble up all the assessment truths you toss their way. And, if you agree, this means you need to try to bolster my efforts in Chapter 1 to get readers to recognize the importance of learning about classroom assessment. Part of the rationale for mastering the content you’ll be treating in Chapter 1 sounds fairly lofty, for example, “A competent educational professional these days must know something about assessment because students’ test scores are the chief indicators of educational quality.” But I’ve found in my own courses that the most effective hook for students is the recognition that this assessment content can make them more effective teachers.

Indeed, in the ninth edition of Classroom Assessment, you’ll find that I often bang away on this bongo, namely, the linkage between testing and teaching. Happily, not only is the potential for the textbook’s instructional payoff a sound motivational ploy—it also happens to be the truth. Thus, I hope you’ll spend at least some early-on time trying to get your students energized so they’ll tackle the textbook’s content with enthusiasm. It really is important content.Truly, teachers who are better classroom assessors will almost certainly be better teachers. Your students need to realize it.

The chapter’s “Teste Self-Test About Teaching,” if you wish to use it for your entire class, ought to be completed at the very outset of the course, for instance, during the first 5-10 minutes of your first class session. You can decide, of course, whether you’ll be asking students to fill out the same self-test at the course’s conclusion. It’s more convenient for students, of course, if you can print out the self-test, then pass it out so your students don’t need to mark up their “precious” book. 3 / 4

Chapter 1: Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment?

2 Federal Law Fever

To many educators, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was a truly terrifying federal law. That’s because, if students did not annually make substantial improvements in their test scores, then a school (and, by implication, the school’s teachers) was regarded as failing. Few teachers yearn to be working in such a school. Although a follow-up revision of that law, 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) appeared to relax federal demands to some extent, the perception still exists that federal education-assessment demands can make classroom teachers hop instructionally. Accordingly, try to assure your students that they’ll be learning about the likely impact of any significant federal education laws or initiatives on their personal day-in, day-out activities. Only teachers these days who are completely catatonic will be unconcerned about assessment-linked federal initiatives that can alter their own careers.

In 2009 (The Race to the Top Program) and 2011 (The ESEA Flexibility Program), two federal programs were accompanied by significant recommendations regarding states’ teacher- evaluation systems. Both initiatives are laden with assessment-relevant implications.

What’s Coming

Many students, especially those inclined to engage in some level of advance awareness, like to know what’s coming in a course or in a textbook. Toward the end of Chapter 1, I spell out three content foci for the whole book, namely, (1) constructing classroom assessments, (2) using assessment devices constructed by others, and (3) planning instruction based on assessments that can help guide a teacher’s instructional decision-making. Whenever I teach a full-length course on classroom assessment (Sometimes, for shorter professional development programs, only parts of the content in Classroom Assessment are treated.), I always try to keep these three emphases clearly in front of students. My students may still get lost along the way, of course, but I try hard to let them know where they’re heading.

Number Fear

Based on my experience, somewhere around 42.74% of the students who take a classroom assessment course are afraid its numerical orientation will overwhelm them. I can’t be too sure about the actual percent, however, because the sampling error on my survey is plus-or- minus 99%. But, data notwithstanding, it’s pretty clear that a good many of your students may be intimidated by what they believe will be a course that oozes quantitative complexity.

I’ve found it helpful to address these number-phobics early in the course. The truth, clearly, is that a solid course in classroom assessment could probably be taught so it never asked students to do much more than compute an arithmetic mean. I certainly believe the majority of the key concepts associated with classroom assessment can be mastered without ever moving beyond fifth-grade math. Usually, after I extol the virtues of a math-free approach to assessment early in a course, I see a half-dozen or so of my students jubilantly pocket their tranquilizers.

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