November/December 2006

(In)formative Assessments

New tests and activities can help teachers guide student learning

by Robert Rothman

Although many teachers in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era complain that students take too many tests, teachers at the John D. Philbrick Elementary School in Boston eagerly signed on last year to give students six more tests a year. The tests, known as Formative Assessments of Student Thinking in Reading, or FAST-R, are short multiple-choice quizzes that probe key reading skills. The tests are designed so that teachers can make adjustments to their instruction based on students’ answers.

With FAST-R “we get concrete, helpful information on students very quickly,” says Steve Zrike, Philbrick’s principal.

Now used in 46 schools in Boston, FAST-R is part of a rapidly growing nationwide effort to implement so called formative assessments—tests that can inform instruction through timely feedback.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

Interview with Ronald Ferguson
Recent Research on the Achievement Gap

How lifestyle factors and classroom culture affect black-white differences

For more than a decade, economist Ronald Ferguson has studied achievement gaps. In 2002, he created the Tripod Project for School Improvement, a professional development
initiative that uses student and teacher surveys to measure classroom conditions and student engagement by race and gender. He spoke with the Harvard Education Letter about the most recent findings from the Tripod Project surveys.

How do you define “achievement gap”?

There are a lot of different achievement gaps. The achievement gap that I focus the most on is the gap between students of different racial groups whose parents have roughly the same amount of education. It concerns me that black kids whose parents have college degrees on average have much lower test scores than white kids whose parents have college degrees, for example. You can take just about any level of parental education and we have these big gaps.

How much progress has been made in closing black-white achievement gaps?

Huge progress since 1970, not much progress since 1990. Sixty-two percent of the overall black-white reading-score gap for 17-year-olds disappeared between 1971 and 1988. About one-third of the math-score gap disappeared during the same period. Over the last several years the gap has narrowed significantly for both 9- and 13-year-olds, but there’s been a bit of backsliding for the older teens.

There’s been enough progress to establish firmly that these gaps are not written in stone.

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Three Thousand Missing Hours

Where does the instructional time go?

One of the most remarkable things about American classrooms is how little real teaching goes on there. Over the past five years or so, I have spent at least three or four days a month in schools studying the relationship between classroom practice and school organization. I observe classrooms at all levels—primary, middle, and secondary grades—and in all subjects. One of the most striking patterns to emerge is that teachers spend a great deal of classroom time getting ready to teach, reviewing and reaching things that have already been taught, giving instructions to students, overseeing student seatwork, orchestrating administrative tasks, listening to announcements on the intercom, or presiding over dead air—and relatively little time actually teaching new content.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

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