Use and Usefulness of Assessments to Inform Instruction: Developing a K-12 Classroom Teacher Assessment Practice Measure

ABSTRACT

Considerable literature is devoted to teachers’ assessment use to support teaching and learning. The study examined the factor structure of a measure of teachers’ assessment use along the assessments of, for, and as learning purpose dimensions. The study also examined the factor structure of teachers’ perceived instructional usefulness of these dimensions. Together, the measure provides a pulse on classroom assessment practice. The validation effort 1) presents the Classroom Teacher Assessment Use and Usefulness Survey, CTAUUS, for use in research on teachers’ assessment practice, and 2) provides empirical grounding for the distinction among the purpose-related dimensions. Exploratory factor analyses revealed two identical factors for use and usefulness: AoL, with five items on the use of standardized assessments; and a combined AfL and AaL factor with nine items that we had anticipated as two separate factors. The study contributes to developing understanding of the conceptualization and measurement of AfL and AaL constructs.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We recognize that teaching-learning is influenced by broader societal and institutional histories, norms, and actions, but that teacher and student are the ultimate actors of those forces in the assessment process.

² An undesirable consequence of rapid adoption of formative assessment was the hyper focus on teacher-directed formative assessment in research and practice without due consideration to the role of students in the learning process. The development of AaL which centers the role of students in the assessment process is perhaps explained by this consequence.

³ We use a line graph in Figures 1a and 1b to easily convey differences by grade level, an ordinal variable; we use language such as increases/decreases in the corresponding narrative for the same reason; this does not imply we measured change over time that is typically reported using a line graph.

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded by The College of Education and Human Development, George Mason University Seed Grant 2020.