“What Parents and Educators Want from Assessments”

What Parents and Educators Want from Assessments is the title of an Edutopia blog post today from Anne O’Brien.

It’s about a recent report on assessment, which I’ve previously posted about — see “What Parents & Educators Want from Student Assessments.”

Anne makes some very interesting points. It’s worth reading the entire post, but here are a couple of excerpts:

survey commissioned by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and conducted by Grunwald Associates earlier this year looked at the views of parents, teachers and district administrators on assessment in education — and found that in many ways, the views of all three stakeholders are aligned…

The survey also found that parents, teachers and administrators share similar views on the perceived value of different kinds of assessments.

After providing definitions of formative, interim and summative assessments to respondents, all three groups of stakeholders found formative and interim assessments more aligned to their priorities than summative. For parents in particular, formative and interim assessments provide the actionable information about their child’s progress that they crave, as well as having what they believe to be a greater positive impact on instruction. Teachers and district administrators also find these assessments more valuable than summative.

Formative and interim assessments also provide feedback in a timeline consistent with what parents want. Sixty-seven percent of parents completely or somewhat agree that formative and interim assessment results are delivered in a timely manner (compared to 50 percent for summative results). If assessment results take more than a month to reach parents, 43 percent of them consider the results no longer useful or relevant.

 

2 thoughts on ““What Parents and Educators Want from Assessments”

  1. I would like to know the make up of parents that were surv ey and education background, and break down by race and genders. Plus, how many parents total was survey, comparison to numbers of teacher.The word somewhat agree mean a little doubt. The article left out of facts that support the result of survey. Was the Parents that took the survey have great understand of data.? These are questions that should be address in article.

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