I went to NCME’s Special Conference on Classroom Assessment a couple years ago. It was stunning how little discussion of classroom assessment there was.
I was in a classroom assessment session at NCME’s regular annual meeting this month. The great Susan Brookhart was there and she pointed out that it wasn’t really a discussion of classroom assessment, at all. Rather, it was about how district leaders, school leaders and teachers might make use of large scale assessment. There was a little hijacking of the session by the audience for a few minutes before the presenters took over again.
I do not point this out to say that there needs to be more room for classroom assessment at NCME. Maybe NCME should just focus on large scale assessment. My work is focused on large scale assessment, it is just my history as a student and a classroom teacher that makes the topic of interest to me. But it’s not my focus. Perhaps NCME does not need to make a place for classroom assessment. This is a very difficult question, and one that requires serious thought and consideration of NCME’s mission.
But it certainly is a problem that NCME doesn’t seem to even understand what classroom assessment even is. That is clear, over and over again.
My co-authors and I came up with our demarcation between large scale assessment and classroom assessment when developing our own contribution to that Special Conference in Chicago. To us, classroom assessments are “assessments of any formality and for any use that the classroom teacher has authored—or of which the classroom teacher has the authority to customize/alter contents, presentation and/or scoring” (Hoffman, Glore, Harrison & Wine, 2024). By definition, classroom assessment is quite different from large scale standardized assessment.
Classroom assessment is most definitely not merely classroom use of large scale standardized assessment. Programming on classroom assessment requires having some grasp on what classroom assessment actually is.
Can NCME recognize this?