Statement on Assessment

BRIEF STATEMENT ON ASSESSMENT
from Bill Carozza, Principal

If you walked into Harold Martin School in mid May you will notice "TESTING-DO NOT DISTURB" signs on some classroom doors, perhaps some nervous third graders sharpening their pencils, and desks lined up in uncharacteristically straight rows. It is New Hampshire Assessment time in our school and for better or worse, these two weeks change the tenor of our building.

Up until the early 1990s, New Hampshire schools had very little curriculum accountability apart from the local town. Most schools based their curriculum on national standards, teacher or administrative preference, or school board requests. Then the state developed curriculum frameworks for English/Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies and fashioned tests to assess how well each school was teaching the frameworks. Third graders take a shortened version with just ELA and Math, while sixth graders and tenth graders are tested on all four areas.

Third graders deal with their nervousness in May but teachers and administrators start getting butterflies the following fall when scores are released. Educators may not always like the scrutiny, but we generally admit that the state assessments are useful.

Yet, with the changing landscape of public school assessment, teachers are tempted to teach directly to the standards and try to cover as much material as possible. The result can be a very dry and incomplete experience for students. One of my important influences, Jay McTigue, an education consultant from Maryland, speaks of this instructional strategy as the "bedsheet" approach. Tremendous content is covered through the stretching out of the sheet, but the result is a thin layer of understanding rather than a deeper and more meaningful one. Instead, McTigue suggests identifying the big ideas and concepts contained in the standards clustering facts and skills under larger ideas and teach toward understanding these ideas.

"A teacher I worked with said these kinds of strategies about big ideas provide ‘conceptual Velcro’ for the particulars and concepts to stick to," states McTigue. "I think that that’s very reflective of what we know about learning." For example, a lesson on the Declaration of Independence should not focus as much on the date the document was signed but on its significance for our democracy.

I hope this provides a little insight into the curriculum and assessment issues that we face as educators in this new millennium.