Educative Essays: Volume 4

By Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

An assortment of essays on education, assessment, portfolios, curriculum, and must more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD
• Release date: Jul 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301958733

Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

Benjamin Stewart holds a PhD in curriculum and instructional leadership and a master’s degree in education, curriculum and instruction: technology. He is a full-time EFL teacher educator and researcher at the University of Aguascalientes in Mexico with an interest in researching personal learning networks and language teaching and learning.

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Beny and Oliver, who have taught me how to truly appreciate my own educative experiences as a father.

Preface

Why a series of educative essays?

I began studying a doctoral dissertation from Northcentral University (NCU) in September of 2007.  NCU is an online university, accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association. The first two years of the doctoral program consists of graduate courses whereby learners upload essays to the NCU platform for credit.  Having completed all of the course work for the program, I realized that I had accumulated quite a few essays over the years, covering a variety of topics within the field of education.  So, why a series of educative essays?  Here are a few reasons:

I realized that I had no personal copies of any of the essays that I had written for NCU - they all resided on the NCU platform for a definite period of time.

The essays were all spread out over various courses and quite difficult to find.  Having them all in a book format would allow for easier access.

I’ve been blogging for several years and have never gotten into the habit of reading prior posts, even when someone would post a reply. It was just something I hardly ever did, for better or for worse.  The same applied to the essays written for my doctoral program.  I thought having them as a single collection would force me to look at how I viewed various educational topics in the past as well as my own writing style.  It has now been long enough that I feel that I can step back and appreciate them for what they are.  Not literary classics, nor excessively profound statements on education written in clear, academic style and tone, but a realization and some satisfaction in reflecting on how my perspective in some cases had changed over the years while in other cases a perspective that continues today.

Never having published a book before, I thought pulling these essays together would justify going through the self-publishing process from start to finish.  I will leave it up to the reader to judge whether doing so was actually worth it or not.

I wanted to offer a book on educational topics under a Creative Commons License so that others could reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute it to give back to the profession of education in some way.

Why order essays by date?

The essays are ordered by date so to respect the order in which I wrote them, spanning a period of about two years.  It also provides a way to reflect on how my writing style and ideas developed during this period.  Some topics jump around between chapters while others are more aligned.  Thus, you may want to skip around to different chapters of the book to read those essays that interest you the most, or you may decide to read them in order, from start to finish.

Yielding to Dewey (1938), the term educative in the title of this book is meant to promote, the growth of future experience (p. 13).  My sincere hope is that to some small degree that this will be the case for the reader - I know the process of putting these essays together has certainly been educative for me.

Benjamin L. Stewart

July 4, 2013

Educational Testing and Assessment: Context, Issues, and Trends

March 19, 2009

This essay discusses the current limitation of educational assessment in five TESOL (i.e., teaching English to students of other languages) programs.  With the current push towards standardized and high-stakes testing, language educators still tend to treat assessment as a separate process to that of instruction.  The alternative is to recognize standardized tests as only one of many tools used to measure a learner’s achievement.  Formative assessment that merges ongoing information and feedback for learners serves as assessment for learning and less as assessment of learning. That is, assessment and instruction become one of the same as feedback is used to guide learners to achieve the expected understandings, knowledge, skills, and disposition.

In recent years, educational assessment has received a lot of attention from administrators, teachers, students, and parents in how schools remain accountable for student achievement.  Since George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on January 8, 2002, standardized testing has become the focus of much debate.  Even before NCLB, high-stakes testing (HST) has been highly criticized for its shortcomings in measuring student achievement while having such an impact on the decision-making processes that schools face (i.e., funding, teacher promotions, etc.).  With so much focus on standardized testing, it is of little surprise that degree programs often neglect educational assessment as a complement to educational testing.  That is, instead of using HST as a single measurement tool for making key educational decisions, schools incorporate a mixture of assessment tools (i.e., formative, summative, and diagnostic assessments) in determining the best option to take in the future in pursuit of improving student achievement.

Before addressing various language programs, some definitions related to testing and assessment might be helpful.  In the classroom, assessment can be divided between summative and formative assessment.  Fisher and Frey (2007) define formative assessment as a way of improving instruction and providing student feedback whereby students self-monitor their own understandings of concepts throughout a unit in order for teachers to check their level of understanding.  In contrast, they define summative assessment as a measure of student competency whereby students gauge their own progress toward course or grade-level goals and benchmarks at the end of a unit or course in order for teachers to grade, promote, and rank students.  Put differently, HST and standardized tests implemented per NCLB – by themselves – are summative assessments that rank students and have little-to-nothing to do with the validity of instruction or the level of student understanding.

Language learning programs today often disregard the importance of educational assessment when preparing pre-service and in-service language educators.  Considering five different universities in the United States, one can see that educational assessment is typically limited to one method course at the undergraduate level and one assessment course at the graduate level (see table 1).Albeit scarce, these assessment courses do focus on formative assessment as a means for improved student achievement.  However, the question becomes whether these programs are allowing enough time for pre-service and in-service language educators to learn not only alternative assessments but why they are assessing in the first place.

Teachers assess students for a variety of reasons.  Popham (2008) distinguishes between yesteryear’s answers to today’s answers as follows:

"Yesteryear’s answers as to why teachers assess students

Diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses

Monitoring students’ progress

Assigning grades

Determining one’s own instructional effectiveness

Today’s answers as to why teachers assess students

Influencing public