Assignment:
Part 1:
Please read the attached readings and answer the following discussion questions.
How is fairness related to the validity of test score interpretations? ( half a page, double spaced)
Part 2:
Read each of the scenarios provided below; answer and discuss your responses to the following questions for each of the four scenarios. (one page; a paragraph for each senario, double spaced) note: u can use the attached readings.
1. What decision would you recommend for the assessment to be fair? (Note: When answering this question include what you consider ideal to support student learning. You may decide on one of the options the teacher is considering or you may recommend any other course of action you think would be fair.)
2. How did you come to this decision?
Scenario 1:
A teacher read her students' plans for a research project, and she wrote feedback to help them organize their work. As she read the last research plan, the teacher realized that she had written increasingly more as she progressed through the class pile. The work that happened to be at the top of the pile received less feedback than those at the bottom of the pile. The teacher considered taking the time to go back over all the students' research plans to make her feedback more consistent, but the class pile was large and she still had to organize the next day's lessons. She wondered if she should add some feedback to the first few plans, or maybe she could just give some students oral feedback in class later.
Scenario 2:
At the end of the first week of school, a teacher wrote comments in his students' writing folders. To get an idea of their writing, he had asked the students to respond to a few quick prompts. Over all he was quite pleased. However, the quality of writing in one folder did surprise him. The writer had formally been identified as a gifted student, but the writing was just average. He had assumed that the student's writing would be more advanced, and wondered how to respond. He wasn't sure if his feedback should reflect the usual expectations for this grade, or focus on just what the student had written, or perhaps be more demanding considering the student's identification.
Scenario 3:
As students wrote in their journals, the teacher circulated and offered encouragement. But she began to notice many capitalization and punctuation errors, problems with subject-verb agreement, and incomplete sentences in the students' entries. She expected students at this level to have already mastered these skills, and she believed that it was important to develop good writing habits. She considered saying this immediately, but she was concerned about interrupting with negative feedback while the task was in progress. She wondered if it would be better to discuss her expectations at a later point, or maybe just ignore those types of errors in the students' journals.
Scenarios 4:
A teacher put down a student's essay with a sigh. He was thinking about the long, flowery sentences he had been reading, and he was wishing that he'd drilled his students more on how to write short, clear sentences. Just then a colleague entered the staff room and noticed the student's name on the paper and she remarked on the student's talent as a writer. She went on to say how she enjoyed the student's writing in the previous year. Realizing that he and his colleague had different views, the teacher questioned his own assessment of the student's writing. He wondered whether he should consider his colleague's opinion, or talk to the student about his views, or perhaps discuss writing styles with the whole class.
Readings:
Fairness as a multifaceted quality in classroom assessment
By Robin D. Tierney