Curriculum Embedded, Essay Example

Emerging Trend in Education: Curriculum-Embedded Assessment

The practice of providing formal education is a process –or, more accurately, an amalgam of processes- that is constantly growing, adapting, and evolving. Attitudes and beliefs about what methodologies best serve the needs of students are different depending on the age of the students in question, the skills the students bring from earlier stages of education, the background of the educators, and a host of other factors that are influenced and informed by everything from geography to politics to economics to religious beliefs. At anygiven time, there are often certain overriding trends that influence large sectors of the educational system; in recent years, one such trend has been the tendency to rely on so-called “high-stakes testing” to quantify the general aptitudes and achievements of large groups of students, typically divided by grade levels. This approach has long been fraught with controversy; detractors question the accuracy, fairness, and validity of this approach. In recent years, an alternative approach to high-stakes testing has emerged in the form of “curriculum-embedded assessment.” This approach has found favor among researchers and educators working in a variety of areas; as the overlapping concerns of these different fields all find measurable positive outcomes with curriculum-based assessment, its potential to overtake high-stakes testing as the primary form of assessment testing becomes clearer and more likely.

“High-stakes testing” is a catch-all phrase that describes an array of different comprehensive-assessment tests (CATs) that tend to share certain attributes both of function and of purpose. Over the last few decades, a “culture of accountability” (Meisels, 2008) has developed in U.S. public school systems. In this culture of accountability, students are periodically tested en masse to gather a general assessment of their aptitudes and proficiencies in areas such as literacy, language, and mathematics, among others. The results of these tests are then used to develop “grades” for the students, their teachers, school administrators, and even the schools themselves. Theses grades can determine everything from if and when teacherswill receive bonuses or pay raises, whether administrators will advance professionally, and whether or not schools will receive funding for needed programs.

These tests are often controversial; detractors question whether they provide fair and accurate accounting of students’ actual abilities, while noting that the consequences of doing poorly on such tests means that preparation for them often takes precedence over actual education. In recent years, emerging trends in early-childhood development and education are calling into question the validity of high-stakes testing; these trends have implications not just for young children, but for students of all ages.

A recent study of English-language learners (ELLs) –students who do not speak English when they enter the public school system- has shown that, especially at younger ages, schools are having some difficulty determining which of these students just need additional language instruction, and which of them have additional learning disabilities that are compounded by their language deficiencies (Huang et al, 2011) . Researchers have determined that cultural and linguistic biases inherent in CATs, compounded by problematic translations, may be skewing test results, leading to an inordinately high number of ELLs being classified as Learning Disabled (LD) (Huang et al, 2011). When a curriculum-embedded assessment model is applied, the skewed numbers suddenly begin to look much more like the normative numbers that are expected to align with specific age ranges.

Curriculum-embedded assessment (CEA) is a type of observational assessment testing that measures how and what children are learning as they learn it (Dunphy, 2010). Rather than make periodic cumulative measurements, testersobserve students as they are exposed to, learn about, and then master various subjects. This approach avoids many of the biases of typical CATs, and is finding favor in many areas of early-childhood education (Dunphy, 2010). A recent study intended to determine the efficacy of certain Head Start programs used a CAE model in lieu of CAT; when measured against similar CATs, the CEA model demonstrably accounted for and avoided the expected problematic areas associated with CAT (Meisels, 2008).

Assessing educational development in early childhood is notoriously difficult. Young children do not yet have the experience needed to even understand how to take most tests, making the design of accurate tests problematic. Compounding the problem of testing pre-K children is the variety of educational backgrounds involved, such as pre-schools, day care centers, home day-care, and single-family home-care. Children from such diverse backgrounds will naturally develop different skills at different times. Designing tests that consider the child’s curriculum and test for the development within that curriculum will, so supporters say, provide more accurate results (Dunphy, 2010).

The implications of this research are significant: high-stakes testing has become a political football and a thorn in the side of many educators. Clear evidence is emerging that CAT is inherently flawed, and that CEA provides more accurate results. If CEA effectively supplants CAT for the youngest students, there could be implications for students at all levels. Assessing development as it occurs at every grade level could eventually subvert the entire education model, promoting the cooperative learning model that is forcibly replaced by the independent-learning/independent-testing model that characterizes primary education. The field of research that determines the efficacy of educational systems may one day determine the design of those systems.

Works Cited

Dunphy, Elizabeth. Assessing early learning through formative assessment: key issues and considerations. Irish Educational Studies. V29 N1.  March 2010

Huang, Jinyan et al. The assessment of English-language learners with learning disabilities: issues, concerns, and implications. Education. V131. N4.  2011.

Meisels, Samuel J. et al. Assessing Language, Literacy,and Mathematics Skills With Work Sampling for Head Start. Early Education And Development, V19 N6. 2008.