Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank for
Classroom Assessment What Teachers Need to Know Sixth Edition
W. James Popham Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles
Table of Contents
Introduction Chapter 1
Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment
1
Chapter 2
Deciding What to Assess and How to Assess It
6
Chapter 3
Reliability of Assessment
22
Chapter 4
Validity
28
Chapter 5
Absence-of-Bias
35
Chapter 6
Selected-Response Tests
40
Chapter 7
Constructed-Response Tests
47
Chapter 8
Performance Assessment
51
Chapter 9
Portfolio Assessment
56
Chapter 10
Affective Assessment
59
Chapter 11
Improving Teacher-Developed Assessments
65
Chapter 12
Formative Assessment
71
Chapter 13
Making Sense Out of Standardized Test Scores
777
Chapter 14
Appropriate and Inappropriate Test-Preparation Practices
82
Chapter 15
The Evaluation of Instruction
86
Chapter 16
Assessment-Based Grading
92
Mid-Course Examination
96
Final Examination
102
Answer Keys
114
An Educational Assessment Confidence Inventory
115
INTRODUCTION This is an Instructor's Resource Manual (IRM) for the sixth edition of Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know. I'll frequently use the space-saving abbreviation to refer to the IRM. What I want to do in this introduction is briefly describe what you'll find in this manual. Clearly, an IRM such as this should make an instructor's tasks more simple. So, if you know what's included in the following pages, you'll surely be able to employ the manual more easily. Publishers assume, and I suspect they're correct, that busy instructors will typically be more inclined to adopt a textbook if the textbook is accompanied by resources to simplify the teaching and testing responsibilities of the instructor. That‘s the mission of this IRM. I hope it will be successful. I've used these sorts of IRMs myself on numerous occasions, but those manuals were invariably prepared by someone other than the author of the text itself. I always had the feeling I was looking at support materials prepared by a graduate student in search of extra income. Some of these manuals were quite good. After all, what are graduate students but instructors-inwaiting? Yet, when it was proposed that an IRM be prepared for the third edition of Classroom Assessment, I decided I wanted to give it a shot myself. A year or two earlier, I had written my first IRM, for another measurement textbook. That endeavor made me a “seasoned” preparer of IRMs. Now, having been asked to update this IRM for the new, sixth edition of Classroom Assessment, I ought to be an old pro at any IRM party. You can judge, after you've used this IRM, whether I should have turned the task over to a graduate student. Signed by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) might not have registered on any earthquake-detecting Richter Scale, but it certainly shook up U.S. public education dramatically. I’m guessing that a 7.0-8.0 Richter reading would be about right. And because of NCLB’s impact on classroom assessment, the previous edition of Classroom Assessment tackled that impact head-on. For the new sixth edition, however, I was confronted with a genuine quandary. Although NCLB was supposed to be reauthorized by the time I needed to send the revised edition off to the publisher, for a variety of reasons that reauthorization had not yet taken place. So, if I tried to base this new edition on NCLB’s particulars, I was certain I’d be linking at least segments of the book on federal requirements that were no longer in force. On the other hand, any attempts to base the sixth edition on a yet-unknown federal statute would be flagrantly foolish. Accordingly, the new edition often alludes to “federal accountability requirements,” or some similar phrase, without spelling out what those requirements actually are. I wish I could have spelled out how the sixth edition ties into whatever federal statute follows NCLB, but I fear this will be a task for the instructors who adopt this textbook. If I possessed the gift of prophesy, I’d have been able to pull it off. If the predicted reauthorization of NCLB actually takes place during the time the new edition is in the production process, please familiarize yourself with the new law’s assessmentrelated features. It seems almost certain that a revised NCLB, that is, a new version of the 1965
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will have an impact on the nature of classroom assessment in our schools. A new federal accountability law will not alter the nature of the sixth edition’s content, but any federal law spelling out how our public schools are to be evaluated will, obviously influence the way educators employ the concepts and procedures set forth in Classroom Assessment. Innards of an IRM Here's what you'll find in subsequent pages. For each of Classroom Assessment’s 16 chapters, you'll find the following components: • Instructor to Instructor: A brief Instructor-to-Instructor section in which I try to relay instructional insights gleaned from my own experiences in teaching classroom assessment courses at UCLA or in school districts. For certain chapters, these instructor-to-instructor introductions are merely experience-based musings that may be useful to you. For other chapters, I've provided an introduction to the chapter's content other than what's contained in Classroom Assessment itself. I've also supplied a brief preview of IRM-suggested activities for the chapter as well as that chapter’s test. There's also an answer key provided for the chapter test. • Chapter Activities: In each chapter, two or three activities are described that you might wish to use with your own students. Each of the activities is based on content treated in the chapter. Although I've used a good many of these activities over the years, I am definitely not recommending that you use all of the suggested activities for a chapter. Indeed, you might choose to use none. However, if you wish to have your students engage in either small-group or individual exercises, these activities may give you a few ideas. The activities, of course, are eminently modifiable. Each suggested activity is identified by the following symbols: ♦♦♦. • Chapter Tests: For each chapter there is also a test. You'll find those tests consist of different sorts of test items. Again, I am not recommending you use all of these tests. In many instances, a chapter test might not even be sensible. However, if you want to employ a chapter test, there's one available. No spaces are provided for students' names on the chapter tests, in case you might wish to have students write their names on the backs of any test. There are also no designations in any test's directions regarding how many items there are in the test. This will allow you to shorten any test simply by deleting its final items so that, for example, a ten-item test is transformed into a five-item test, and so on. If you reduce a ten-item test to a one-item test, you’ve probably pruned a bit too ruthlessly! • Mid-Course Examination: There is also a mid-course exam and a final exam provided near the end of the IRM. Let me explain about the nature of those two tests. I think it will help you understand why I chose to design them as I did and, perhaps more importantly, how I view a course on classroom assessment for experienced teachers or prospective teachers. A few paragraphs earlier, I proclaimed with thinly masked pride that I was a seasoned
developer of IRMs. The text for which I’d done my ground-breaking IRM work was a book about assessment that would typically be used in doctoral or master’s degree programs for individuals preparing to become educational administrators, curriculum specialists, and so on. For that textbook’s IRM, I had created a 50-item mid-course and a 100-item final exam using multiple binary-choice items. When I was getting ready to write this new IRM, that is, the IRM for Classroom Assessment, I fully intended to create the same kinds of tests that I had generated for the earlier IRM. After all, I knew how! But the closer I got to doing it, the less comfortable I became with the prospect. You see, to create a 100-item exam on a 16-chapter book, one is often obliged to focus on fairly finegrained bits of truth. And some of those fine-grained bits of truth, although one can create suitable items assessing them, deal with content more subtle than is suggested by Classroom Assessment’s subtitle, namely, What Teachers Need to Know! Thus, I focused more on the major concepts I want classroom teachers to comprehend. And in doing so, I found myself moving toward shorter and different sorts of exams. I ended up creating a pair of exams consisting exclusively of multiple-choice items. There is a 25-item mid-course examination on pages 96-101. It is based on Chapter 1 through Chapter 7. On pages 102-113 you will find a 50-item final examination. It covers content in all 16 chapters. Frankly, I do not think either of these exams is particularly difficult. I suspect you will agree. But I was not trying to create tests leading to fine-grained norm-referenced interpretations. I just wanted these exams to indicate whether a student taking a classroom assessment course had learned the most important points about educational testing that classroom teachers really need to know. In that regard, throughout Classroom Assessment the reader will frequently find sets of concepts, rules, or activities to be understood—such as three kinds of validity evidence and the five general item-writing commandments. Now, given that I was only intending to devote approximately three multiple-choice items (in the mid-course and final exams) to each chapter, you’ll find I often created items asking the student to identify an answer option that was not a member of the set of “things” treated in a chapter. This approach, although it typically forces the student to look for negative instances, is a much more efficient way to see if the student recognizes at least the bulk of chapter-identified content. If you use either or both of the IRM’s exams in your own classes, you may wish to call your students’ attention to the frequent presence of item-stems in which a non-instance is sought. Incidentally, if you wish to toughen up either examination, I suggest that you simply add one or more essay items to either the mid-course or final examinations. Those essay items, of course, should deal with the content you stressed as you taught the course. • Answer Keys for Mid-Course and Final Examinations: On page 114, answer keys for both the mid-course and final examinations are presented. • Classroom Assessment Confidence Inventory: A classroom assessment confidence inventory consisting of 15 items is presented on pages 115-116. This affective inventory can be