To Help Create Writing Assessment As A Field Of Study And Practice At The College Level

By Author: Jackey
Total Articles: 54
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We prefer Elliot's account because it provides a more detailed description of the genesis of CEEB, including the role played by Farrand. Elliot's version is important for another reason: the only component of Farrand's proposal omitted by college-level educators as part of CEEB was his idea that a student's high school would participate in the process of her college admission by certifying what she had learned in order to document academic achievement and direct the kinds of Thomas Sabo admission testing necessary. This idea seems fairly important to our purpose in this history, because it signals that over one hundred years ago, teacher judgments were found suspect, and a test was assumed to be better at helping university admissions personnel make important, consequential decisions about students.

Diederich's account is a good example of a common type of assessment narrative that stresses efficiency and problem solving, while deleting the role of teachers from the story altogether. In addition to the unequal power relationships and the unfounded faith in examinations, this ...
... omission of a student's performance in high school is bad practice at the very least, because high school performance has over the years remained the best single predictor of success in college. In his book Standardized Minds, Peter Sacks makes an argument about the overuse and inflated importance of testing in American education. In addition to interviews with students and administrators, he provides a lengthy review of the scholarly research on the ability of SAT scores and grades to predict college success. In summary, Sacks notes, "Indeed, it is almost always the case in studies of the SAT effectiveness that high school grades are more powerful than any test score".

Nonetheless, faith in so-called objective measures of writing assessment persists. For at least one hundred years, then, reliable and valid writing assessment outside of a school context has been envisioned as Thomas Sabo Bracelets a better source of evaluative information about students than teachers are. Throughout the history of writing assessment, its integrity and value for educational reform and efficacy are usually examined in terms of its ability to be reliable and valid in a technical sense. Educational measurement in general has defined itself and its history in terms of reliability and validity (AERA, APA, and MCME 1999 Standards). The rest of our history traces the initial emphasis on reliability and a later shift in focus on validity. We chronicle how this shift in focus helped create writing assessment as a field of study and practice at the college level.