Saturday, July 13, 2013

Interview with Joan Herman on the new assessments

If you're interested in the new assessment systems, you might take a look at this interview with Joan Herman who is the former director and current senior scientist at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is advising the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Lots of interest there, 'though this bit jumped out at me:
From a technical point of view, what do you think are the appropriate and inappropriate uses of these test results?I worry about the results being used in value-added models for teacher evaluation. The results can give us a general barometer of where individual kids are relative to the Common Core standards. I think they will enable us, combined with information on school characteristics, to identify schools that are doing particularly well and those that aren’t. But I worry about making fine-grained distinctions between schools, teachers, and individual kids based on relatively minor differences in scores. Any score is an estimate.

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