| Chapter 1: | Story of the Research |
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Teachers talked extensively about the questionable and subjective nature of their own assessments and discussed how difficult it would be to validate their assessment scores when compared to standardized scores.
In the Anders and Richardson (1992) study, teachers appeared to lack confidence in their own judgment and feared subjectivity; they seemed to believe that the objective tests produced by testing companies had greater validity and credibility than teacher-created assessments. These teachers had been disempowered to the point that they no longer behaved as autonomous professionals. They assumed that standardized tests were superior to their own teacher-made tests when, in fact, the opposite may have been true. The data indicated that external testing affected teachers to the point that it encumbered their own assessment procedures.
Other data on teacher autonomy over assessment also came from Anders and Richardson’s (1992) work. The authors defined assessment in three ways: placing students in reading groups, determining skills mastery from basal readers, and determining report card grades. How teachers felt about these assessments dictated how much control they were willing to take over decisions regarding assessment. For example, placing students in reading groups was seen as least risky for teachers. Teachers perceived reading placement as low risk because they could easily move misplaced children and because their decisions were rarely challenged. This group of teachers was not afraid to exercise autonomy if the risk was perceived to be low and nonpublic.
Teachers were not afraid to place a student in a reading group even if the placement contradicted previous years’ data on student placement (Anders & Richardson, 1992). This is interesting because the previous years’ data come from basal reader skill-mastery tests, which teachers defined as the least valid of all assessments they gave.