Education Commons^™

Teachers’ Use Of Standardized Assessments To Monitor Learning And Its Impact On Student Reading Achievement, Eilyn Sanabria

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reading instruction must be “intentional, systematic, and explicit” and “implemented by a knowledgeable teacher” (Ruetzel & Cooter, 2019, p. 87). The era of accountability has brought standardized assessments to the forefront of reading instruction. However, gaps about assessment-related and instructional practices and their impact on student achievement exist in the literature. The present study aims to provide needed insights on how these practices help or hinder, specifically, historically low-performing students.

Using student achievement and teacher survey data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten 2011 (ECLS-K), and through the lens of data use theory (Hutchins, 1995; Spillane, 2012), hierarchical multiple …

Estimating School-Level Achievement In Belize, Betty Jean Usher-Tate

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion with final thoughts. The research design of this dissertation study attended to structures, cultures, and characteristics associated with, and specific to, the Belize education system. The processes for data collection and types of analyses were appropriate, yielded meaningful results, and served as a segue for national application. The Belize Educator Survey was developed to capture the educators’ voices and illuminate their relationship to educational achievement in Belize. The Belize Educator Survey was piloted and revised with direct input from educators and experts who work in the Belize …

Easycbm And The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program: A Correlational Analysis Of Reading Achievement, Stephanie Ann Stone

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Current trends in education suggest that the best way to help struggling readers is to provide academic intervention before they fall too far behind. Schools that use annual standardized test scores to determine students’ academic deficiencies, and thereby their need for intervention, only receive these score reports once per year, often several weeks or months after the students have been assessed. The purpose of this correlational analysis of reading achievement was to compare students’ performance on the EasyCBM progress monitoring tool to students’ performance on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program for third, fourth, and fifth grade students at a suburban …

Beyond The Red Pen: A Functional Grammar Approach To Evaluating The Written Language Of Deaf Students, Jennifer Kilpatrick, Kimberly A. Wolbers

Theory and Practice in Teacher Education Publications and Other Works

Deaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach to language analysis to provide teachers with a new way to evaluate deaf students’ writing. This project consisted of two studies. The first study focused on determining whether SFG analysis could be helpful for teachers of the deaf. The second study focused on mapping a trajectory of the …

Teacher Perceptions Of Assessments In Character Education: A Case Study, Sarah Hickman

Senior Honors Theses

Since the time of Aristotle, educators have emphasized character as a necessary part of a student’s education, and currently, many states mandate character education by law. Because of this historical and legal emphasis, there is a growing discussion on the necessity of assessments in character education to ensure that character education programs are effective. While there is research on the large-scale effectiveness of programs with different assessments, there is little research about how teachers perceive assessments and measurements in character education. This study was conducted to begin to address this gap in the research. Through the research design of an …

Impact Of Flexible Seating On First Grade Reading Progression, Stephana M. Logue

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Proponents of flexible seating options within the classroom claim this simple change will transform education, improve children's engagement and learning, and renew classroom teaching. Opponents argue that such benefits are overstated because, currently, little evidence exists that eliminating desks and chairs improves learning and student engagement. In this study, the impact of flexible seating on first grade reading scores was examined and how it is implemented when teaching reading at the primary level. This quantitative research plan used the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmarking Kit to determine if students who chose the option of flexible seating during the reading block had …

The Double-Edged Sword Of Standardized Testing, Barbara Meyer, Christine Paxson

Faculty Publications - College of Education

Assessment in Pk-12 schools has always been a challenge. Measurement and comparison of students, schools, school districts and states provides accountability for all stakeholders in education. Standardized testing has become the norm, but it is overused. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers is one test adopted on a large scale to measure whether students are prepared for college and career. Parents are one of the stakeholders who had had concerns about another standardized test, but they also recognize the need. A survey was conducted of parents whose children took PARCC to learn their expectations of the …

Exploring The Factors Teachers Consider In Determining Students’ Grades, Thomas R. Guskey, Laura J. Link

Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to investigate the specific factors teachers consider when assigning students’ report card grades. Data were gathered from 943 K-12 teachers from five school districts in a southeastern state in the United States who completed the Teachers’ Grading Practices Survey. Analyses focused on how teachers weigh different factors in determining report card grades, and if these factors and weights differ among teachers who teach at different grade levels and have different amounts of classroom experience. Results revealed statistically significant differences among teachers at different grade levels but no differences associated with teachers’ years of …

Informed And Uninformed Naïve Assessment Constructors’ Strategies For Item Selection, Helenrose Fives, Nicole Barnes

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a descriptive analysis of 53 naïve assessment constructors’ explanations for selecting test items to include on a summative assessment. We randomly assigned participants to an informed and uninformed condition (i.e., informed participants read an article describing a Table of Specifications). Through recursive thematic analyses of participants’ explanations, we identified 14 distinct strategies that coalesced into three families of strategies: Alignment, Item Evaluation, and Affective Evaluation. We describe the nature of the strategies and the degree to which participants used strategies with frequency and effect size analysis. Results can inform teacher education on assessment construction through explicit instruction in …

Creating A Context For Growth-Focused Assessment, Nicole Barnes, Helenrose Fives

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a naturalistic case study of one teacher’s development of a growth-centered context for classroom assessment. In-depth interviews, analysis of student work, and observations were used to identify the processes this teacher used to engage her students in the assessment process. Data were analyzed using listening guide analysis to garner a holistic perspective on the nature of teaching, learning, and community established in this classroom. Findings are described by aligning the specific techniques used by this teacher to the growth mindset supportive instructional strategies noted in the literature and then providing tips for implementation in a middle grades classroom.

Dialogic Conversations In An Embedded Literacy Assessment Field Experience, Lucy Spence, Amy Donnally, Amy Johnson Lachuk, Marcie Ellerbe

Faculty Publications

Preservice teachers often come into teacher education programs with a positivist view of assessment, which may have developed during their own schooling experiences. For this reason, purposefully constructed course work and field experiences must be offered to enable them reframe their conceptions of literacy assessment and to complicate the assessment practices that have become most familiar to them. This paper examines a course in which, the aim is to intentionally counter the positivist testing culture and invest in helping preservice teachers understand assessment as a multi-faceted, dynamic process of inquiry.

Scaling Up “Evidence-Based” Practices For Teachers Is A Profitable But Discredited Paradigm, Gary L. Anderson, Kathryn Herr

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

This article takes issue with the notion that professional learning communities need to be more focused on teacher expertise through the use of online videos of lessons taught by expert teachers that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The authors argue that the use of externally developed, research-based, and standards-aligned videos violates the principles of authentic inquiry that underlie professional learning communities. They also caution that a profit-seeking education industry is increasingly behind the promotion of evidence-based products.