| Chapter 1: | Story of the Research |
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(2004) defined formative assessment as a means of diagnosing student learning as a means to improve pedagogy and curriculum. Wiliam et al. said that teachers find it difficult to navigate in a culture that relies so heavily on graded summative measures (especially when they are appraised by the results of such measures) and that there is tension between the two assessment types.
McMillan and Nash (2000) cited research that indicated teachers do not evaluate students on achievement alone. Teachers combined assessment of student achievement with assessment of student effort, conduct, and perceived ability. Teachers who have the autonomy to assess students as they see fit, and who try to use assessment as motivation for student success, must deal with the tension between their own beliefs about assessment and the current view of assessment as defined by the federal government. Indeed, McMillan and Nash said that there was “tension between the internal beliefs and values of teachers and the realities of their classroom environments and other external factors that are imposed on them” (p. 11). Let us now examine this tension as it was defined by McMillan and Nash and through the lens of teacher autonomy.
McMillan and Nash (2000) found that without constraints defined by external accountability, teachers had tremendous control over how they assessed student progress. Assigning grades can be very idiosyncratic, and the way in which teachers assign grades is often based on their values and beliefs grounded in personal philosophy. Classroom realities affected assessment as well. For example, children’s behaviors and attitudes, their home environment, mainstreaming and social promotion, test anxiety, and absenteeism all factored into teachers’ assessment decisions. Both teacher beliefs and classroom realities competed with the “forced objectivity” (p. 6) of mandated statewide testing to form the tension surrounding assessment.The authors found that this tension increased as the stakes of mandated testing became higher and decreased with teacher experience.