Morality, Validity, and the Design of Instructionally Sensitive Tests by David Berliner
A recent article in Education Week was written by David C. Berliner, Regents Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. As pertinent to our purposes, here, I have included his piece in full below, as well as the direct link to this piece here.
Please pay particular attention to the points about (1) “instructional sensitivity” and why this relates to the tests we currently use to calculate value-added, (2) attribution and whether valid inferences can be made about teachers as isolated from other competing variables, also (3) in consideration of teachers’ actual potentials to have “effects” on test scores versus “effects” on students’ lives otherwise.
Moral Reasons for Using Appropriate Tests to Evaluate Teachers and Schools
The first reason for caring about how sensitive our standardized tests are to instruction is moral. If the tests we use to judge the effects of instruction on student learning are not sensitive to differences in the instructional skills of teachers, then teachers will be seen as less powerful than they might actually be in affecting student achievement. This would not be fair. Thus, instructionally insensitive tests give rise to concerns about fairness, a moral issue.
Additionally, we need to be concerned about whether the scores obtained on instructionally insensitive tests are consequentially, used, for example, to judge a teacher’s performance, with the possibility of the teacher being fired or rewarded. If that is the case, then we move from the moral issue of fairness in trying to assess the contributions of teachers to student achievement, to the psychometric issue of test validity: What Morality, Validity, and the Design of Instructionally Sensitive Tests by David Berliner |: