doi: 10.1002/tesq.194, Leaper, C., and Robnett, R. D. (2011). Educational Leadership
Brandon, for his part, described the CCSS as micropolitically “beneficial” as a kind of professional lingua franca, enabling him to enter disciplinary conversations about professional expectations and practices. The GI contains 119 word lists representing 16 categories of emotion and social cognitions.4 Social cognition refers to the cognitive processes related to other people and social situation. The psychological gender roles, which were measured by a psychological role orientation scale, were found to have limited effects. Table 2 presents how these groups of features could partially represent the scoring dimensions. The needs of students change based on the environment the students live in and the environment that they’re going to be going into. Language Arts, 93(4), 260-272. That’s more important. Rose (2016) underscores that the politics of pathways—our overt contestation over the paths structured for students—can be complicated or confounded by the ways educators interpret and engage with reform initiatives, something Blase (2005) has called the micropolitics of educational change. Moreover, our participants embraced externally-mandated standards while interpreting them in ways that matched their local instructional goals, assessment preferences, and the writing constructs they privileged. “I think they’re [the CCSS] too restrictive,” she told us, adding: I think standards in general are too restrictive. However, due to the settings of the language proficiency exam, we could not meaningfully report or compare the features measuring cohesion between paragraphs. Critically examine the construct of interest with regard to its stability and variability across social, cultural, and racial divides. 3.1.2 Mentor Teachers. How? To borrow Gallagher’s (2011) turn of phrase, “being there matters” (p. 468). What value (if any) do you think the CCSS have for students? This article complements and complicates these conversations by attending to the micropolitics of pathways: how local education actors mediate reform-related standards, and, in the process, pave what they believe to be locally-meaningful pathways. Discour. Doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA. Kyle, K., and Crossley, S. A. 19, 246–276. Indeed, the negative correlations between the two cohesion indices and writing scores suggest that highly proficient writers are less likely to rely on these features to achieve coherence. For this reason, we argue conversations about pathway-related reforms can benefit from adopting a micropolitical perspective, sensitive to the participation of teachers in locally constructing and maintaining educational pathways. 15, 474–496. Note that Cronbach’s formulation clearly focuses on negative consequences of a particular test, not the testing industry as a whole. This study included three mentor teachers—Anne, Brenda, and Cathy (Appendix A, Table A3)—from among those recommended by our field instructors. A propensity score method for investigating differential item functioning in performance assessment. A test with severely negative educational (and other) consequences should, Cronbach (1988) declared, be discontinued. Then, to identify the linguistic features that contribute to writing scores, we conducted correlation analyses to identify those showing statistically significant correlations with writing performance (p < 0.05). 34; see also Poe, 2008). Psychol., 03 June 2020
(2015). Monday through Friday
The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity sounds like a promising candidate for the job, but its focus is on accreditation and certification of institutions of higher education. At the same time, this object-oriented focus risks backgrounding teachers, who are at least as important as tests and textbooks for mediating pathway-related standards. This corpus-based study focuses on an e-mail writing task that demonstrated gender DIF favoring female test takers slightly in Chen et al.’s (2016) writing DIF study and aims to address the following research questions. Cronbach, L. J. In G. Hillocks, Jr., Ways of thinking, ways of teaching (pp. 4.0 Two Testing Corporations’ Attempts at Self-Study of Educational Consequences. It's objective. What grades/subjects have you taught (or do you plan to teach)? I start to answer that question in section 5. Blase (Ed. Causes of gender DIF on an EFL language test: a multiple-data analysis over nine years. Meanwhile, only 6 out of 24 sentence-level features were divergent between genders, including sentence length and use of finite verbs. So much is said about the CCSS and its effects on American education—shaping (perhaps narrowing) curricula, constructing (perhaps constraining) postsecondary pathways—we might forget that, when abstracted from local contexts and enactments, these standards virtually cease to exist. Consistent with the previous statistical analysis results (Chen et al., 2016), the findings of this study suggest that this particular writing prompt was not a serious fairness concern. Among the four syntactic features that are different between the gender groups, three were positively correlated with writing proficiency and one was negatively correlated with it. For students, a bad test score may mean missing out on admission to the college of their choice or even being held back. Barnes, N., Fives, H., & Dacey, C. M. (2017). Toward writing assessment as social justice: An idea whose time has come. So how severe are the negative consequences of standardized tests in general? Troia, G. A., & Graham, S. (2016). There may exist, hidden away somewhere from my efforts to find it, a document from Pearson that attempts to do what ETS commendably attempted to do. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Kunnan, A. J. Available online at: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/english/pdf/pub/language-benchmarks.pdf (accessed October 1, 2019). I know they are good people who intend to bring about positive consequences, not only for their organization but also for society. We first survey the literature on gender differences in language use with a focus on writing. English Language Arts (ELA) teacher education is a professional space that articulates K-12 and postsecondary actors who might have different beliefs about writing assessment, goals for writing education, and interpretations of writing standards. As a result of this ratcheting up of the educational consequences of tests, studying and preparing for exams (such as those formerly connected with No Child Left Behind and, more recently, the Common Core State Standards Initiative and the Every Child Succeeds Act of 2015) now have the full attention of teachers and administrators. The same pattern was observed in the two clause-based syntactic indices, namely, complex nominal per clause (e.g., “Even being able to find options within the menu …”) and undefined dependents per clause (i.e., ungrammatical clauses). Overall, female test takers consistently outscored their male counterparts on all the distinctive features identified in the present study. Journal of Writing Assessment, 8(1). As an educator, though, I see a key ethical safeguard missing from this formulation: What if a test is designed with such an inadequate construct of writing (e.g., a 20-minute timed impromptu scored by a computer) that harmful educational actions (e.g., a diminished rhetorical curriculum and pedagogy) result even from “correct inferences”? If it’s a college prep school, standards might be, you know, … a little bit, they should be higher expectations. Future studies can investigate whether our results apply to other types of writing prompts. In other words, their interactions with the CCSS were not passive, but strategic and rhetorical. Evaluating teacher perspectives and casting our analytic focus beyond them are crucially important projects, but they are not ours here. We collected data for this IRB-approved, qualitative, interview-based study between April and June of 2015 from three professional subgroups of teachers. Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success. (2016), the writing samples were selected based on test takers’ reading and listening scores. I think that impacts students a lot, because our kids, … they need to be ready for the real world, and Common Core does not always address those needs.” Departing from other mentor teachers, Cathy said of the CCSS, “Yes, it’s raising the bar to a higher level, but sometimes students need more than that.” Here, “raising the bar” was equated to something decidedly less than what students needed. In this way, they framed the CCSS less as a reform that imposes pathways in (and between) schools than as a kind of rhetorical instrument teachers could use when describing the local instructional pathways they constructed. (n.d.). The ascendancy of national standards-and-assessment reform initiatives (like the CCSS) is only a recent entry in a saga that stretches back over a century (see Addison & McGee, 2015)—the story of complex pathways, diverse teacher practices, and how reformers have sought to manage them. The emphasis on writing in the curriculum has been accompanied by the rapid growth of writing assessment. We asked them to recommend participants from student and mentor teacher pairs in their cohorts. As Brenda told us plainly: “I guess, in the scheme of all things to be concerned about, this [the CCSS] is just not high on my list.” What was high on her list? College Composition and Communication, 62(3), 450-476. Additionally, while explicit consideration of social justice concerns has been beyond the scope of the present project, it is important to remember that any efforts to define student needs and pave educational pathways are freighted with ethical significance. (See Slomp’s first case study for an example of how concerned parties might follow through on such a commitment.). Assessment of differential item functioning for performance tasks. Particular thanks are owed to Norbert Elliot for the (characteristically generous) mentorship and recommendations he provided as we began drafting this article; to Christie Toth, for the (consistently good-natured) advice and support she provided us as we revised our work; and to Chandra Alston, without whose sponsorship our research would have been impossible. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The G-theory results indicated that the current single-task and single-rater holistic scoring system would not be able to yield acceptable generalizability and dependability coefficients. However, nowhere did I find specific strategies or even promises from Pearson regarding how it takes responsibility for evaluating those educational “outcomes.” This lacuna resonates with the disturbing silence in the ETS document around gathering evidence of educational consequences and test-takers’ rights to the promised “quality and equity in education.”. Rubin and Greene (1992) applied an expanded view of both biological and psychological gender to their study of gender differences in writing at a United States university. To give one recent, community college-focused example, Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins (2015) have suggested student outcomes can be raised through adoption of what they call “guided pathways,” which provide students with directive guidance and a more focused curriculum—using faculty and advisors to coordinate (or guide) students “instead of letting students find their own paths through college” (p. 16). Many would argue that teacher and student performance should be evaluated for growth over the course of the year instead of one single test. It calls for ETS researchers to “investigate whether the unintended consequences may be linked to… construct underrepresentation. Blase, J. One of the criticisms offered byDr. The term “micropolitics” has been used in education research to account for the heterogeneity, dissensus, and complexity at the core of education work. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 15(1), 1-25. “Fairness and justice for all,” in Fairness and Validation in Language Assessment, ed. The editor and reviewers' affiliations are the latest provided on their Loop research profiles and may not reflect their situation at the time of review. To understand how the two genders communicate, at the macro-level, Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988) proposed a gender-as-culture hypothesis and described four dimensions of inter-cultural styles. The Pros and Cons of a Four-Day School Week, The Buildup of Standardized Testing Pressure, Pros and Cons of Using a Traditional Grading Scale, The Pros and Cons of Allowing Cell Phones in School, M.Ed., Educational Administration, Northeastern State University, B.Ed., Elementary Education, Oklahoma State University. Q. Male students used more topical organization, cohesion as in inter-paragraph linkage, and essay ending features. Test. What were you responsible for in this educational context? Have the state-wide tests for evaluating student progress changed in response to the CCSS? It's stressful. There is a dimension to Sinclair’s comment that merits some discussion here. For example, emotion-laden lexis and words about social cognition may be less important in a neutral inquiry e-mail than in a complaint. Lang. 80, 476–498. doi: 10.1191/0265532202lt230oa, Mulac, A., Bradac, J., and Gibbons, P. (2006). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. c. Have a supplement or alternative to report cards and standardized tests. They employed machine learning techniques to screen a large number of topic-independent linguistic features (list of function words and list of part-of-speech n-grams), and obtained a set of features that can help identify author gender. Our findings suggest that even among a small number of closely-connected teachers and teacher educators, the CCSS and its related assessments took on a multiplicity of meanings. More generally, participants reported developing locally-meaningful lessons and assessments, and strategically curating the “common core” of standards to match uncommon local needs. 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Sentiment analysis and social cognition engine (SEANCE): an automatic tool for sentiment, social cognition, and social-order analysis. In the remainder of this section, we briefly discuss the potential importance of this micropolitical perspective for shifting how we think about professional secondary-postsecondary partnerships (§5.1) and how we talk about teacher engagements with pathway-related standards and assessments (§5.2), before concluding with some limitations of our work and how future research might redress them (§5.3). They should and still can be a mere snapshot of ability. Pages 72-75. And it—to me, it involves a lot of … technology skill that I don’t know that our students have.” Rather than calibrating her classes to CCSS-aligned large-scale tests, though, Anne reported another (more local) way the CCSS was instantiated: formative classroom assessment. (2005). Poe, M. (2008). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. The critical question for this discussion is how well they attend to the educational consequences of their tests, and what they do about it if and when they discover that their tests are causing educational harm. Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Some of the most common arguments against testing are: It's inflexible. Importantly for our purposes, this was true also where writing assessment was concerned (§4.2). Alexandria, VA 22311-1714. This prompt asked test takers to write an e-mail of 150–200 words to a restaurant. I therefore propose federal regulation and oversight as the only apparently functional mechanism by which to counterbalance testing corporations’ pursuits of private profit with the U.S. public’s right and responsibility to protect the quality of students’ educations. If test takers with the same writing ability have a different probability of receiving the same score on a writing test because of their gender, it will raise concerns about score validity and test fairness. This may help clarify that the sophistication levels of the language used by all test takers were reflected in their adoption of the more common VAC structures or lexical items employed by native speakers of English (Kyle, 2016).
Importantly, Brenda’s description of the CCSS here positioned it less as a reform of practice than of what we call that practice—with teachers adopting a new, shared convention for existing staples of their local work. The participants provided their written informed consent to share their anonymised responses for research purposes. Bristol Tennessee Board of Education asks state to pause standardized tests. These diverse sources complicate the manifestation of a DIF effect and challenge the identification of its sources. This absence gives me a feeling of deep foreboding, because (as section 3 above demonstrates) we cannot fulfill our shared commitments to “quality and equity of education” unless we know the impact of the tests in question. Given the relatively large number of linguistic features investigated in this study, we applied Bonferroni adjustment to the significance levels to better control the overall Type I error rate. 23, 321–346. “I don’t look at the standards as standards, I look at them as suggestions,” Cathy claimed; “They’re a good place to start, but they can go either way. Our article dwells on this tension. Also, it has been asserted that features of global cohesion were more predictive of essay quality than local cohesion measures such as the use of connectives (Guo et al., 2013). We chose to compare the individual features between the gender groups, rather than generating latent variables or components via factor analysis (FA) or principal component analysis (PCA) for the following reasons. While using DIF prompt with a small effect size may seem as less optimal for studies that aim to explore gender differences, still, this type of study is helpful in addressing the interpretation of statistically flagged DIF items, especially considering the prevalence of writing prompts that were reported slightly favoring female test takers in different exams (e.g., Welch and Miller, 1995; Broer et al., 2005; Breland and Lee, 2007). 4.2.3 Field Instructors. For example, while sentiment and social cognition features may be relevant to the aspects of relevance and tone of the task fulfillment dimension, the same dimension is also concerned with the completeness of responses.
Lang. In particular, were you responsible for planning lessons/activities? 1-18). Murphy, A. F., & Haller, E. (2015). … And the same thing with the testing…. Students that are just going to go out into the world and just want to find jobs, and they just want their high school diploma so that they can have that, they’re [the standards] not as important. Note that these two features were negatively correlated with writing proficiency, indicating higher values on these cohesion indices are associated with lower writing scores. Meas. In what form (online, printed, condensed, complete)? One hundred and twenty CET-4 essays written by 60 non-English major undergraduate students at one Chinese university were scored holistically by 35 experienced CET-4 raters using the authentic CET-4 scoring rubric. They maintained that generally, women may be perceived as being more indirect in expressing their views, more prone to using sophisticated language, more thoughtful with social roles, and more attentive to others’ feelings in general interpersonal communication. Distinctive syntactic features between the two gender groups (TAASSC). Speaking of the CCSS, Cal described the negative assumptions that might accompany failure to draw on the vocabulary of the CCSS: “if you don’t necessarily have it embedded into … you know your lesson plans and everything you’re doing, then you’re not necessarily an effective teacher.” Like Brandon and Alicia, Cal’s facility with the CCSS provided him a way to signal professional growth to the field instructor who supervised his lesson planning. A single-task and single-rater scenario leads to large score variation. This may be related to the inherent challenges in conducting DIF analyses on writing tests (Welch and Miller, 1995; Chen et al., 2020). Many studies have discussed and reported gender differences in writing. They guided student teachers in preparing lessons according to school and state requirements, and helped student teachers apply abstract content and procedural knowledges to real workplaces. How? Cal’s sense, though, was less that the CCSS opened professional doors than that it closed opportunities for professional censure. (2016). We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. (1991). It's inauthentic. As soon as I became a secondary teacher of literature and writing (in the 1980s), however, I immediately witnessed the adverse educational consequences of standardized testing. This analytic approach was supplemented with memos and notes shared between and reviewed by both researchers. Where the politics of pathways are concerned, we miss much of the action—and deny much of teachers’ agency—if we focus on standards themselves as determining the educational pathways students take. The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) mission statement affirms that agency’s commitment to “fostering educational excellence,” so protecting the education system from harm seems to fall under DOE’s jurisdiction. Moving beyond the common core to develop rhetorically based and contextually sensitive assessment practices. Rather than piling ethical burdens on the objects of my critique (ETS and Pearson), I am lifting those burdens from them and foisting them on the rest of society. By the end of the book, the organization has fallen silent on its commitment to protect these aspects of test-takers’ lives, and it has averted its gaze from those places it could and should look to see whether and how it is fulfilling its stated commitments. Cambridge, D., Cambridge, B., & Yancey, K. B. Key elements boosting the validity of the writing portfolio over many other writing assessment designs are: In Cushman’s (§3) terms, the writing portfolio is the pluriversal assessment technology par excellence, opening up students’ opportunities for multiple avenues to rhetorical success while at the same time obligating them to succeed in multiple genres or rhetorical situations. It’s nice that everybody’s on the same page.”. Assess. This was my first experience with the distortion and impoverishment of teaching and learning brought about by high-stakes standardized testing, and it has stuck with me. We elaborate on these three issues in the following paragraphs. Indeed, Brenda—who was National Writing Project-trained and taught a high school class on college writing—stands out as perhaps the participant most enthusiastic about the SBAC. 18). Considering himself “ideologically aligned” with what he considered the CCSS’s emphasis on teaching with “big questions” in mind, Caleb claimed “teaching those types of lessons well ensures that kids are going to do fine on the assessment.” Caleb attributed the controversy over the CCSS large-scale tests to “misconceptions” in the wake of a weak introduction: “the way it [the CCSS] was sort of rolled out and implemented didn’t really promote a lot of clarity, and I think some parents are refusing to let their kids test, and some states are opting out….”. Fortunately, the two best-known purveyors of standardized tests—the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson, Inc.—both have published ethical guidelines for their businesses. 4.2.2 Student Teachers. DOE already has in place at least one board and one committee dealing with assessment, but neither seems right for the responsibility on which my proposal focused. The problems identified with these assessments were less a matter of local, micropolitical engagement than of macropolitical controversy and chaos—with local interpretation and navigation complicated by a confusing rollout (Caleb), state-level indecision (Barbara), and a national inability to adopt a single, standardized assessment (Amanda). Particularly, the possessive pronoun–related feature is unique to this study; this may have reflected the wide use of possessive pronouns in the e-mail samples. Broad, B., Adler-Kassner, L., Alford, B., Detweiler, J., Estrem, H., Harrington, S., … Weeden, S. (2009). In summary, scholars agree that males and females tend to write differently (Mulac et al., 2006). (1999, p. 79). While the similarity in stylistic features between the gender groups may be conditioned by the task characteristics (e.g., level of formality), Rubin and Greene (1992) found that female writers showed higher excitability with more exclamation points, and a lower level of confrontation with greater consideration for opposite views. The other articles in this issue (Elliot, Slomp, Poe & Cogan, and Cushman) gather resources from the disciplines of philosophy, validity theory, law, and cultural studies to forge a new praxis of ethical writing assessment. (2005). The samples and the test materials are the properties of the test publisher, Paragon Testing Enterprises. These findings are meaningful for furthering our understanding of the small gender DIF effect identified through statistical analysis, which lends support to the validity of writing scores. While we might find that “the type of writing assessment mandated by the state will influence the writing instruction that high school students experience” (O’Neill, Murphy, Huot, & Williamson, 2005, p. 104; see also Hillocks, 2002), the nature and extent of this influence remains “mediated by teachers’ beliefs and attitudes” (Troia & Graham, 2016, p. 1738)—a point we return to in our findings (§4.0) and discussion (§5.0) sections. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Critically examine any test or assessment program with close attention to social and educational outcomes (both intended and unintended). (2015). Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/, Common Core State Standards Initiative. This confirmation serves as an additional piece of evidence relates to test fairness and contributes to a validity argument for the test scores (Kunnan, 2000). The data generated by testing can be organized according to established criteria or factors, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and special needs. In the past century, new assessment technologies (including writing scales, rubrics, holistic scoring, and automated essay scoring) have emerged in response to the perceived problem of heterogeneity (i.e., unreliability) across teacher assessments of student writing (Elliot, 2005). For example, one might expect that field instructors would share an orientation toward the CCSS, using it to evaluate student teachers’ lesson plans in a state that had adopted the CCSS. Rather than follow a narrow curricular pathway determined by the CCSS, the teachers in this study curated the CCSS, strategically determining which standards to emphasize and how best to assess student mastery of them. Most of the relationships between the gender-related language features and writing performance are in line with theoretical expectations of the writing construct (see Table 2). According to Sacks’s survey of testing research, standardized tests corrupt and diminish both curricula and pedagogy, the chief professional concerns of teachers. Kelchtermans, G., & Ballet, K. (2002). My middle daughter, who recently finished 8th grade in a Pennsylvania public school, has known what a scoring rubric is since 4th grade, two years before she had to take her first official state-mandated writing assessment.
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