Most experts in the testing community have presumed that the $350 million promised by the U.S. Department of Education to support common assessments would promote those that made greater use of open-ended items capable of measuring higher-order critical-thinking skills.
But as measurement experts consider the multitude of possibilities for an assessment system based more heavily on such questions, they also are beginning to reflect on practical obstacles to doing so.
The issues now on the table include the added expense of those items, as well as sensitive questions about who should be charged with the task of scoring them and whether they will prove reliable enough for high-stakes decisions. Also being confronted are matters of governance—the quandary of which entities would actually “own” any new assessments created in common by states and whether working in state...
I'm particularly amused by the concern over the "added expense." Presumably that's what the $350 MILLION DOLLARS is for.
Can I be the first to say to the testing industry: No Excuses!
BTW, I'd pay $30 a year for online access to EdWeek, but I can't do $60 plus.
5 comments:
> I'd pay $30 a year for online access to EdWeek, but I can't do $60 plus.
Yeah? How much would you pay for OLDaily?
(Just to put it into pespective)
What about the on-going
What about the on-going costs of scoring more sophisticated assessments?
Stephen,
$10?
Yeah - that's why I do it for free. It's very niche, there wsould never be enough people willing to pay enough money to make it enough to live on.
That's the problem generally with funding content through subscriptions. It forces content to the mainstream in order to increase subscriptions.
In this case the "problem" is that Ed Week has lots of institutional subscribers for whom $60 is nothing, and relatively few individual readers who are just reading for "fun."
Post a Comment