Preparing Teachers for the '90S: Redirecting the Content of Measurement Courses

Introduction The determination of relevant content in educational measurement courses becomes increasingly difficult with emergence of significant changes in forms and types of classroom assessments administered to children. Portfolios, anecdotal records, attitude scales, teacher-developed checklists, and self-assessment techniques are examples of assessment instruments signaling profound changes in instruction and purposes for assessment. Preparing teachers to utilize these types of classroom assessments requires substantial change from prevailing content focus of undergraduate measurement courses. Throughout this paper term measurement will be used to identify a variety of course titles used to teach assessment principles and techniques to prospective teachers. Difficult content decisions await teacher educators who must prepare students to function as assessment literate teachers in next decade. According to Merwin (1986) in The Knowledge Base for Beginning Teachers, Teacher training programs have a professional obligation to future teachers and their students to see that new teachers have basic knowledge and skills they will need to make effective evaluations. Recently, representatives from American Federation of Teachers, National Council on Measurement in Education, and National Education Association developed standards that effectively frame assessment competencies associated with good teaching (National Council on Measurement in Education, 1990). Although undergraduate institutions and programs shoulder bulk of professional responsibility for preparation of teachers, curriculum decisions determining measurement course content generally lie with individual instructors. In other words, how successfully future teachers will assess student achievement in next decade will depend largely on content decisions made by their measurement instructors today. Therefore, an important question for today's measurement instructors is: should focus in measurement continue to be toward large scale standardized assessments or toward alternative types of holistic assessments? The purpose of this paper is to discuss current relationship of assessment in schools to measurement curriculum, present prevailing influences that are exerting pressure on current assessment practice, and suggest a curricular direction for measurement instructors. Assessment in Public Education In order to gain a complete understanding of current rationale for measurement content, one cannot ignore prevailing presence of standardized testing in public and teacher preparation institutions. During last several decades much of emphasis concerning student assessment in schools has been focused on adoption and interpretation of large-scale standardized tests. According to National Commission on Testing and Public Policy (1990), mandatory testing consumes some 20 million school days and equivalent of 700 to 900 million dollars in direct and indirect expenditures annually to schools around country. Rough estimates of amount of instructional time spent by each teacher in preparation for standardized tests are placed at an average of fourteen hours per year (Tierney, 1991). Despite amount of testing done annually, there appears to be considerable misinterpretation of purpose for standardized tests. Haladyna, Nolan, & Haas (1991) refer to standardized test score as the coin of realm of education and list twenty nine different uses of standardized test data in public schools. The uses range from policy analysis at a national level to parent review of children's achievement scores. The designers of standardized examinations did not intend for unrestrained utilization and interpretation of achievement test data that occurs in today's schools. Nor did they intend for misinterpretation that accompanies its inappropriate utilization. …